A couple of years ago, I found a skip full of boxes of geological samples, powdered stone and earth from all over the world. I strapped some of the boxes I’d emptied to the back of the bike, as they now seemed full of the possibilities of future use.
Of the flat kind, I have a small pile, still empty but one, in a filing cabinet full of negatives and photographs. The one that is filling up has the irregular shaped, stained and bad-dry-distorted test prints from my black and white printing within. Torn strips of people’s faces, broken images of… well, a variety of things.
The cube boxes I saved I took to school to make pinhole cameras. Yesterday we made one with a bin, a binhole camera perhaps, and had the group sit on the steps for the 15 minute exposure, in the cold, complaining a bit, listening too to the tinny phone beats, chatting, warning cars away from our array of cameras. We’re a little blurred, but you can see a few details; the flowers on my shirt are white stains there. I built the 12 or so 10×8″ sheets up into an image in photoshop. It’s okay. The Edifice of the school is there clean lining it against the Sky, and we merge with ourselves reflected, into indistinction.
This isn’t from the bin, it’s from one of the boxes from the bin.
