Pin Hole Camera
A Metaphor for the Visual Artist
By Colette Odya Smith
As practicing visual artists, we must all be quite familiar with the language surrounding descriptions of what it is we do and what role we play in society. Most of that language revolves around seeing. The artist is a visionary; they see things through their unique eye. This continues. They share their perspective, they reflect back to society, they reveal truths, they expose things, and so on. Without diminishing the role of our hearts, our heads, and our hands, it is our eyes I want to focus on. Sorry, pun intended.
I have pondered how to more deeply understand and express what I observe happening in the workshops I teach. I endeavor to recognize and honor the diverse ways each participant approaches their painting and in doing so I have been struck by both the universality of what artists do and paradoxically, the distinctiveness of what they do and how they go about it. What has come to mind is the metaphor of the artist as a pin-hole camera. I haven’t committed to this metaphor with both feet yet, rather I am sharing this as something I am mulling over. These thoughts may wander. These ideas are still developing. It is a work in progress.
So, try this on with me. We, the artists, are presented with the world about us, reading as our reality, our experience. It isn’t everything out there, it is more what we (the box camera) are aimed at. It is conditioned by our location, direction, and by the external conditions surrounding us. Still, there’s a lot out there and we choose to some degree what we aim ourselves at, like aiming the camera.
Whatever all of ‘that’ is, through the miracle of the ability of light to travel, it gets condensed as it passes through us (the pinhole). That condensation, with its particular character, is where all that incoming information gets colored, processed, evaluated, felt, and responded to. Then, just as actually happens in the human pupil/lens or pin hole, the image expands against the back wall of the box camera/retina but inverted, upside down.
There we have our own image of the experience, turned on its head, yet available for our brains and hearts to imbue with our personal understanding. By passing through the point of contraction and interpreted by our brains via the optic nerve, it somehow becomes transformed into our unique perception, embodying all of who and what we are; revealing our purposes, responses, and predilections. Significantly, when the image expands again against the back wall of the box camera/retina, it is translated from the 3-D world into a 2-D image. Then, that’s exactly what we do when we apply pigment onto the flat surface of the paper, board or canvas. The expanse of what we take in, including every meaning of depth, contracts to pass through us, the artist, and expands again in the flat visual form of a painting.
For me personally, part of what charms me about this metaphor is that I so often aim my vision looking down towards the reflection of the world turned upside down in water. We could even digress into the idea of water as a metaphor for lots of things, including humans. I have never forgotten a Star Trek episode from many years ago in which an alien describes humans as ‘ugly bags of mostly water’. Hilarious, but containing truth! But I do digress.
When I present water in my work, I often use it to reference the whole natural world. It reflects the sky, the trees or rocks that surround it, the light bouncing off its surface, the shadows that skim across it, the leaves and debris that fall into it, the movement of it shown in distortions of colors and forms. This upside-down representation fits my pin-hole camera metaphor as a way of expressing that my ‘take’ on nature, on my visual inspiration, is just that – my expression, not some kind of outside objective reality. It is my lived reality.
Another aspect of this upside-down expression is my understanding of the physical world as being shaped by universal immutable principles, both physical and spiritual. This understanding obliges me to be attentive to what specific scenes are revealing and what we might learn from them since they are reflecting those principles.
And here’s another take I have on the idea of the world “condensing’ through the artist. It might be like a compressed computer file. The file appears smaller than what is actually contained within it. How this happens is something completely beyond me, but there it is.
My imagery presents as one small bit of nature: a corner of a pond, a shadow on a single rock, etc. I still want that image to hold as much content as possible. An example of what I mean can be seen in the Japanese arts of Bonsai and Ikebana. Trees are miniaturized and plant material is minimal, yet representing an entire forest, bringing to mind great lengths of time, holding the place of profound relationships.
Perhaps these art forms developed as a response of a large population to living on a small land mass. I thought of this when my sister traveled to Japan when she worked in a garden and landscaping industry. At a trade show she saw 12” squares of grass sod stacked for sale in packs of 4. When she asked about them, she was told those were “lawns”.
So, like the condensed image, the compressed file, or the Bonsai tree, I want my images to hold so much more than their size. I describe this as attempting to “find everything in the specific”.
As a youth and a young adult, I felt unable to live out my dream calling to be an artist because I believed that the artist needed to have something special to say. I thought the artist was supposed to have superior knowledge and skill about something that the world needed to see in paint, and I did not believe that my knowledge was superior, nor was my skill greater than the thousands of others whose work I saw around me. It didn’t seem that the world needed my poor contribution to the amassed body of artwork being produced.
Since that time, I have been blessed with a different understanding of the value of my unique vision. My particular lens/pinhole/vision isn’t necessarily superior to others, nor is it necessarily needed by the world. It is necessary to me. My vision is more about what I’ve been given to share than what I can claim credit for having. I see my role is to aim my eye/camera at what I am intuitively drawn to. My task is to pay attention to the image (with all the emotion and content within it) that appears within me. My vocation is to develop my skills as much as possible so that my work in paint is possibly of use and service to some others.
One last aspect of the pinhole camera metaphor that I enjoy is the idea of openness, of receptivity. Without the emptiness, the opening, of the pinhole the light could not get in. If I am filled with myself, my ego, that which is being offered to me can’t get through. I need to get myself out of the way to receive the inspiration that is meant for me. Of course, my particular lens will still create my particular take on what I am drawn to pay attention to (what I aim myself at).
So, I have come to believe that each artist’s particularity is reason enough for their work to be valuable. This idea of being the focal point, of being receptive, doesn’t mean we don’t need to work at our craft and refine our vision. Effort and dedication are surely needed to improve. This improvement might be likened to making sure our pinhole, our vision, is improved through removing obstructions, cleansing, or burnishing the lens “to see more clearly”. And this is where effort and dedication must get directed – towards our whole self, because that is the principal element of what we present in our art.
