dianne bos

galaxy series

While working with traditional photographic techniques for over forty years, I’ve evolved varied thematic bodies of work and merged technical innovations to create new visual hybrids. The resulting innovative uses of pinhole, film, camera obscura, photogram, installation, and cyanotype all explore the world around us and play upon intersections of artistic production with scientific research and discovery.

Pinhole photography allows me to create my own unique camera object and suggest a relationship between it and the image it makes: a book on the West photographs the Western horizon, a galaxy of pinholes creates a new universe. In 1999 I began experimenting with these “homemade” cameras, which allowed me to understand and play with aspects of light beyond what my eyes see—to render visible that which cannot be seen.

And since I couldn’t get into space, I had to invent my own pinhole camera to help speculate about and interpret the sources of light. In a pinhole camera, light travels through the lensless, pinhole-sized aperture to project an image, upside down and backwards, onto the back of any light-proof container. Multiple apertures project multiple images. If the container has photosensitive paper or film inside, that image is recorded as in a lens camera, but over much longer exposure times.

I’ve been able to explore time and space from my darkroom using large-format multi-aperture cameras that I’ve built, in which the sizes and positions of the pinholes on a metal plate match the actual pattern of stars. My early source materials for these star patterns, spiral galaxies, globular clusters, and constellations were often deep-space images taken with the Hubble telescope. Each exposure via these multi-aperture cameras uses only one light source, whether a light bulb, candle, or television set: but through the properties of light and the pinhole, a galaxy of images results. Self Portrait as a Globular Cluster was made by photographing a clip of myself from a taped TV show where I am discussing my Galaxy images. The Milky Way by Candlelight interprets the source of heavenly bodies as humble candle flames. At first glance these images appear to be just another grouping of outer space telescope images, but upon closer inspection one realizes one is looking at familiar, everyday objects—images for a new folk cosmology mythologizing the nature of light itself.

My recent installation work invites viewers to enter multi-aperture pinhole cameras. In 2015 I was invited, along with artists and scholars with a keen interest in the camera obscura in contemporary art practice, to participate as an artist collaborator in the Midnight Sun Camera Obscura Festival in Dawson City. I installed a multi-aperture pinhole tent, which developed techniques from an earlier work (Garden Shed Galactica, shown at Museum London, Ontario, in 2007). The multi-apertured “prospector’s tent” reflected Dawson’s location and historical past, and combined science, history, and art. Apertures mirroring the placement of actual stars projected images of the sun and surrounding landscape inside the tent to create an interior starry night sky that would not normally be visible during the period of the midnight sun in Dawson. In a more recent work called Star Shed, installed outside the McMaster Museum of Art in Hamilton, Ontario (2018), each aperture in the darkened shed projected a unique view of the exterior, creating a kaleidoscope of images. The pattern mimics that of the stars in the southern skies at this location and time of year, invisible during daylight.

The excitement, for me, lies not in photographing and reproducing something I can see, but in revealing the imperceptible (and maybe only the imagined) using the physics of light and time.