Pinhole photographs by Ross T Smith

+ Linger - pinhole photographs by Ross T Smith

2 – 27 February 2010

Bartley + Company Art + 56A Ghuznee St, Wellington + www.bartleyandcompanyart.co.nz

Summertime is a good time to slow down, to take time and to linger with things and that is exactly what photographer Ross T Smith has done and is asking viewers to do with his new body of pinhole photographs.

Smith first came to prominence a decade ago with his poignant portraits of young Maori in the Hokianga, which are in the collection of the Auckland Art Gallery. Now he has turned his attention to the most primitive of cameras which is a way of looking diametrically opposed to the fast glance fostered in today’s visually saturated contemporary world. The pinhole photographs which are dark, grey, quiet and beautiful play with notions of memory, time and silence.

“In my own way I am lingering in a world of making that is rapidly changing because of digital technology and the supposed need for speed and immediacy. Immediacy is the antithesis to lingering. During the exposures time passes before the camera. The image recorded is not a fraction of time but time lingering upon the surface of the negative,” Smith says.

The photographs are hand-made using traditional darkroom techniques. The exposures are long – 20-60 minutes – depending on light and location. The ‘camera’ is a cardboard box - there is no hi-tech interference at all; no lens, no shutter, no moving parts, no mechanisms. The selenium toned prints are double landscapes – two negatives, two exposures, contact printed together. They are handled before exposure and so show smudges and fingerprints as a memory of the hand of the artist.

Smith says these photographs allow him in the making and the viewer in the looking to slow down and become engaged with phenomena in all of their subtle presentations to us.

“To linger means to spend a long time over something so that it doesn’t disappear from your realm of perception and experience. Memory is a repository of images which linger in our subconscious, drifting indistinctly among other sensory memories of our life’s experience as traces of the present passing into history,” he says.

Ross T Smith has been working on the pinholes for a few years but has only recently started exhibiting them. His photography parallels his education and teaching in architecture. He recently returned to New Zealand from Helsinki where he lived for several months doing research towards a PhD in architecture at the University of Auckland.

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