Final Installation: Pinholes & Ghosts

 My name is Elizabeth Dow and I am a student in the BFA in Visual Arts program as well as a Admin Assistant in the Faculty of Media, Art, and Performance.  This class has been challenging in a way that none of my prior photography classes have been, but it has been so rewarding and having the chance to display our works in the Archer library has been amazing. 

Back at the beginning of the semester our class created pinhole cameras from cans and placed them somewhere to capture an image for the entire length of our course.  This would result in an image that captured the sun's progress across the sky every day and its rise higher each day as well.  

In the window of my office, facing SE

On the bird feeder outside my house, facing S

On a lamp post at the University, facing S

The images that these cameras captures clearly the path of the sun as well as how sunny our days have been from January to April. This photographic process that interesting to learn about and also simple to construct.  The only danger being if your cameras were going to be taken over then time period or affected by the weather.  

The other project that I worked on for this installation was combining photographic negatives with my diorama pieces to create ghostly images within the scenes. I did this by placing the negative on the sensitized paper and then placing the tiny figures, trees, furniture, etc. on top on the glass used to press the negative to the paper.  

I also created pieces using a combination of negatives and contact prints with diorama pieces to make different types of ghostly images.

As the main focus of my photographic process over the past couple of years has been building diorama's to take images of I wanted to attempt to make cyanotype images that I could then build a diorama out of.  As Professor Horowitz put it to me yesterday, it seemed like a "full circle moment" to have used photographs to build a diorama which I could now use to stage scenes for future photography images. 

This semester has been a wonderful experience working with this group of people and getting to collaboratively put together these cabinet displays. Rhylynn and I shared one side of the display for the semester and always had a great time putting our heads together to figure out how to make it look amazing. 

Of course we could not have done any of this without Risa Horowitz who pushed us the whole way through and suggested the Archer display in the first place during our first or second class.  Thank you for everything you do and for another amazing class.