Bob Clayden
I have been working with pinhole cameras for the last 20 years ever since the funeral of Lady Diana when I wanted to photograph the minutes silence and so I made a pinhole lens
front to fit on a removable lens camera and adjust the film Speed to so that it would take photographed the whole of the minute silence looking at the memorial in Billericay High Street . Investigating the idea of time in a photograph and playing with the idea that a photograph wasn't just a single moment in time . I continued to work with pinhole cameras and pinhole photography over the next three or four years and started making a pinhole cameras and using recycled objects running workshops for young people in particular to get the idea of using analogue photography to make a photographs although in those days it wasn't much in the way of digital photography but by 2002/2003 I was working regularly with pinhole photography and deciding to try and make things bigger .I now made my first extremely large camera it was drying room on the 8th floor of a tower block was 5 metres by 6 and a hole approximately 2 mm across made from 3 razor blades. The room was blacked out and then by collecting images on easels set up around the room we made negatives.
I was also interested in colour pinhole photography particularly in using colour transparency I wanted to use a large format for some other projects but couldn't afford to buy an 8 by 10 camera so I made myself an 8 by 10 camera made of mahogany and would hold an 8 by 10 double dark slide with transparency film in it allowing me to take very large colour transparency pictures.
I continued with workshops using mostly drinks cans illy coffee cans to make cameras paper negatives. I made myself a portable dark room so that now I can run a workshop anywhere and we can use this two actually develop it during the workshop so you get the whole idea of how an analogue photograph works.
I continued making so cameras workshops for general drop-in situations using drinks cans and using Illy coffee cans making large holes in covering a hole with aluminium tape and then using a very small pin or needle these needles were often had to be a Victorian needle which was about 0.3 3 of a millimetre in diameter to get smaller holes was from an acupuncturist and they can go down 1.5 of a millimetre for small cameras. I also continued with large cameras Fabric in Bradford asked me to build one in there gallery on a mezzanine floor next to impressions gallery. I made a hole through the wall and made a 2mm in a sheet of copper, the camera itself was made from sheets of plywood and so it was 8 ft high 14 ft long the front half with 7 feet from the pinhole to the negative stage, the rear section was the dark room to process images. In two projects I photographed the Centenary Square using 26 separate negatives 20inches by 16 inches each with approximately 10 minutes exposure and the whole process has been taken over a period of approximately two to three weeks. This time I had more control over the image and I asked people the stand in photograph so that when the final collages made it seem as if they were interacting with each other when in fact I might have been standing there 2 or 3 weeks apart I also tried taking photographs of someone who was deliberately moving very slowly so they became like a ghost again moving slowly and slowly over a period of 10 minutes so it would be image of a person exposing the last part of the image was just being a bit of a ghost.In the second series I asked the people who were standing still for 10 minutes to write a diary entry on what it was like to be still for 10 minutes this became part of the exhibition as were the completed collaged negatives 2 metres wide by 4 feet high. Another project that I did was turning a room in into a camera and photographing the view from the old hospital which is going to be pulled down this was on the 4th floor of a building which haa now being raised to the ground.
Next projects that I became involved in what's the idea of a Solargram, a can with a pinhole in it left open over longer periods of time, I had been experimenting with the idea of a photograph being 10 minutes and then being over longer period of time. Solargrams collect images for as long as you want, 6 months being about the most effective. Each day as the sun crosses the sky it creates a trace on the image and the paper negative is processed with a computer to make the ethereal images. I helped Adele Jackson make cans which she took to Port Lockroy Antarctica.