2022 marked the sixth year of my ongoing Winter Solstice Pinhole Photographs series, and I’m happy to report that the shooting of the 2022 batch, shot mostly along Iceland’s southern and western coasts, is complete.
The conditions there were the harshest I’ve experienced in the multi-year series so far. The wind and cold truly pushed the limits of the seeming fragility of photography’s most basic physical mechanics, which, to me, are reflected in the functionality of the pinhole camera itself. It also highlighted the effort this project requires in exercising such fundamental photography principles, in making such simple images.
This has all been part of the Winter Solstice Pinhole Photographs project from the beginning; the possibility that it might not work at all, as every photographer knows, a given of analogue image-making. Even without extreme conditions, this is a possibility. That’s where I want this project, and everything I do, to be—at the edge of not working, or of being not workable.
Arctic darkness, wind, cold, fatigue: Iceland threw these pieces of the Winter Solstice Pinhole Photographs series into relief. I’ll process the results later this winter. I hope this comes through in the results.