I have been photographing for over twenty years now, and for the last five years I have worked exclusively with homemade pinhole and plastic toy cameras. I enjoy making images with tools that are primitive, technically imperfect, and in ways, beyond my control.

The toy camera has a plastic lens that creates color shifts and light leaks. With its poor optics, the highlights seem to glow and the focus and light fade from the center to blurry dark corners of the image. I can overlap one moment with another in time, not knowing how it will come out. This creamy, painterly effect has an almost 19th century pictorial aesthetic that I fuse with my immediate experience. I like to photograph in my local neighborhood or in my travels. I look to the landscape, where public and private meet, and where nature and culture affect each other. Parks, gardens, front yards, and the ever-changing scene from a moving car window pique my interest. I am drawn to ordinary places that have a strange disquieting beauty.

Like the toy camera, pinhole photography also brings the unexpected. But with the pinhole process, I trade the spontaneity of the toy camera for a slow, clumsy method. I make my own cameras from cardboard boxes, popcorn cans, or tiny mint tins (the photos on this page are a few examples). I pierce one surface of the camera with a pinhole and this acts as a lens, letting in the light for the exposure. I use slow photo paper for film and must wait minutes and sometimes hours for an exposure rather than the usual fraction of a second that a traditional camera would need. This long exposure insures that variables such as wind, shifting light, breath, or the subject’s movement, all make their mark on the image. I am fascinated by the idea that a still image can reveal time passing. When I look closely at things, which the pinhole process allows, a richer, fuller reality manifests, one that can hold contradictions comfortably. So, a place that seemed claustrophobic now becomes spacious in the resulting image.

It is my desire to be fully present when I make a photograph, to allow intuition to bring my eyes to rest on what resonates for me. Both of these primitive formats allow me to enter a place where metaphor and mystery can surface.

All photographs are digitally printed on Hahnemuele rag paper with archival pigment inks. They are available in 8”, 12” or custom sizes.

For more information, please email alice@alicegrossman.com.

You may also download my résumé.