Art Gallery

The Architectural Foundation of Santa Barbara is pleased to announce the opening of PINHOLE NOIR, an exhibition of recent pinhole camera photographs by Lindsay Skutch.

An opening reception will be held at the Architectural Foundation of Santa Barbara on Saturday, March 28, from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. Skutch will present an Artist Talk in the gallery on Saturday, April 25, from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m.

Lindsay Skutch’s striking black & white photographs of familiar sites and sights in Southern California are taken with pinhole cameras she constructs using Sanka coffee cans, cardboard CBD containers, and Christmas cookie tins. The photographs have an eerie, outside of time feeling—like buried memories or dimly remembered dreams.

Pinhole cameras are a form of camera obscura (Latin for dark chamber)—a room or box with a small opening that allows light to pass through a tiny aperture, or pinhole, and project an inverted image of what is outside onto photographic paper on the opposite surface inside.

The exposure varies depending on location, sun direction and subject matter. The paper is processed in a darkroom, and it becomes the negative. Skutch prints all her photographs from cameras she makes and the negatives she processes.

The camera obscura/pinhole camera technique has been used since the 16^th century by artists like Leonardo da Vinci; also, as a way of observing eclipses without looking directly at the sun and damaging the eyes.

Lindsay Skutch grew up in Greenwich, Conn.  She was 13 years old when her father built her a dark room and she discovered that photography was her voice.  She attended Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, Calif.

After a successful, 38-year career in Los Angeles and New York producing global commercials with directors John Frankenheimer, Sidney Pollock, Alfonso Cuaron, and Kathryn Bigelow, Skutch now revels in the chance element involved in making pinhole photographs:

“You have no idea if the negative will turn out or what the image is truly going to look like. There is no viewfinder and no way of knowing if the tin can is even pointing at what you want it to.” 

She credits Marian Roth of Provincetown, Mass. for teaching her the basics of this art form.  Roth once said to her, “I make photographs, I don’t take photographs.”