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| Photograph by JP Atterberry Photographer Information Douglas Frank, American, Born 1948; Currently living in Portland, Oregon.
Photographer’s Contact Information :
dffrank56@mac.com
Earned Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from
Marquette University, 1971 and 1974, respectively.
Mr. Frank’s photographs have been exhibited and
published worldwide in numerous shows and publications over the past 35 years.
His published books include:
Douglas Frank
Landscapes, The Halsted
Gallery, Birmingham, Michigan, 1983. Currently out of print.
Stone Beings, William James & Company, Portland, Oregon,
2009. Currently available through a number of booksellers as well as the
publisher.wmjasco.com/content/ston#9BF21A
His work currently is on display in a group show
entitled Poetics of Light: Pinhole Photography, in the Herzstein Gallery of
the New Mexico History Museum, Palace of the Governors, Santa Fe, NM, through
March 29, 2015.
Below is a partial list of museum collections which
include photographs by Mr. Frank. His work also is included in numerous private
collections.
Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Paris
Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio
Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas
Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Palace of the Governors Photo Archive, Santa Fe, New Mexico
St. Louis Museum of Art, St. Louis, Missouri
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California
Pinhole Photography Technique
Most of
the photographs in Great is God's Faithfulness were made with a pinhole camera.
The technique of Pinhole Photography is the simplest form of the photographic
medium. The “camera” consists of any light tight box with a tiny pinhole on the
front end and light sensitive material such as film, which is attached to the
inside of the back end. There is no focusing mechanism nor is there a shutter.
Since the pinhole projects an extremely dim image onto the film, exposures must
be long and are measured in seconds, minutes, hours or even longer.
The
camera constructed for this series of landscapes has an extremely wide field of
view, thus distorting the relationships between the visual elements, while also
concentrating the light toward the center of the film. It was frequently
necessary for me to wait many hours for a given exposure to reach completion,
thus compressing these hours into what only appears to be a picture of a single
moment.
The
following is a quote by the two curators of the largest archive of pinhole
photographs, Eric Renner and Nancy Spencer. Pinhole images “express reality
very differently from imagery made using cameras with lenses. Although
describing the mystery of pinhole images is difficult, the concepts of soul,
depth, yearning, timelessness, and archetypal feeling all contribute to the
kind of visual reality produced, one perhaps only seen in a dreamlike state.”
While
each image in this series is completely un-retouched or modified, the final
image bears only a passing resemblance to what was actually being seen from
behind the camera.
Douglas
Frank
Portland,
Oregon, 2014
|
The Artist
