Since 1999, a group of enthusiastic pinhole photographers has been harvesting interaction, preserving history, and challenging conventional assumptions about photography at Burning Man. Our aim is to document the people, art and events at Burning Man each year, while we teach others to explore their creativity through this hundred year old technique of pinhole photography.

With pinhole photography, the “lens” is merely a pinhole, created from a thin sheet of aluminum, and affixed to the camera body.  

The Pinhole Project exposes 30 x 40 inch sheets of light sensitive gelatin silver paper. We work with 12 pinhole cameras, created out of 50-gallon cardboard barrels. This size is uniquely suited for capturing the incredible scale and immense diversity of art and culture at Black Rock City. 

Under the red safelights of the darkroom, photosensitive paper is inserted into the camera body. Exposures range from 40 to 300 seconds, where concentrated beams of sunlight are funnelled through the pinhole and into the camera, creating a negative image of the recorded subject.

We maintain a desert darkroom in a shipping container, where we gather to processes, develop and fix about one hundred photographs each Burning Man. These unique images are then exhibited all over the playa.

Through this convergence of raw energy and traditional techniques, the pinhole photography group has each year given back to the community an artistic record of what was achieved at Burning Man: a uniquely alternative means of allowing observers to peer into the radical self-expression, innovation and art that is at the centre of the playa community.

Each summer in late August, thousands of people travel to the remote and barren Black Rock desert of Nevada to create the Black Rock City, also known  Burning Man. Home for a week to artists, revelers, people who want to express themselves through dance, art and play. This is the home of the Pinhole Project.

The pinhole camp has been creating large-scale portraits with festival participants since 1999. The pinhole came about of the desire of four first time participants to contribute in a unique and lasting way to the ephemeral pleasures of the playa.

As we have grown, so too has our belief that this device is the reason that we make our annual pilgrimage. As we have evolved, so too has the camera, not only in functional and technical capabilities but also in its role as a seed of meaningful engagement with other participants.

The pinhole camera is posited as one possible answer to certain questions which essential to places like the playa: what is the nature of 'documentation' on the playa? And how can one transform the exploitative nature of a relationship with a 'subject' into interplay between the documenter and the documentee where the result is a record of something that might otherwise have never come about?

Pinhole photography is a medium that engages swaths of time, where clouds stretch across the sky and the endless chatter of movement melts away. It can extract an essential stillness from the world through a primitive apparatus of reflected sunlight passed through a minute opening.

We believe in this process, and we hope that our belief and our creations embody what it is that drives us all on the lifelong journey of creation that flowers each year on the playa.

The Goal of the Pinhole Project:

“Through this convergence of raw energy and traditional techniques, the pinhole photography group will give back to the community an artistic record of what was achieved at Burning Man: a uniquely alternative means of allowing observers to peer into the radical self-expression, innovation and art that is at the center of the playa community. “

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