For the month of December, I’ll be an artist-in-residence at the Vanha Paukku Cultural Centre in Lapua, Finland. The center is housed in several buildings, the largest of which was, for most of the twentieth century, a rifle cartridge factory. Today the facilities house galleries, studio space, a brewery, restaurant, and museum. The Ostrobothnian Photography Center (POVA) is also on site.
I’ve scheduled the residency for December in order to take advantage of the limited sunlight that the area offers that time of year. For the last couple years, I’ve made analogue pinhole images on and around the winter solstice, the date on which light in the northern hemisphere is most scarce. Using a pinhole camera, photography’s rawest and most fundamental technique, to make a photographic image feels appropriate.
This year, I aim to underscore this notion by traveling close to the arctic circle (the latitude at which, on the winter solstice, the sun will not rise at all—and for much of the winter latitudes even farther north experience polar night), and make sunlight as precious a commodity as possible on this planet. Once there, I’ll assemble pinhole cameras and get to work on this and some related projects.
