DAN McCORMACK

Accord, NY

Nude at Home - Shot with a Pinhole Camera

This photo exhibition showcasing female nudes captured with a pinhole camera offers a captivating and thought-provoking exploration of the human form. The use of a pinhole camera, with its simplicity and lack of lens, adds a unique and raw quality to the photographs, enhancing the vulnerability and authenticity of the subjects. The absence of intricate details and sharp focus allows the viewer to focus on the essence of the female body, emphasizing its natural beauty and grace. The interplay of light and shadow, created by the pinhole camera's long exposure times, adds a poetic and ethereal quality to the images, further enhancing their artistic appeal. This exhibition challenges societal norms and invites viewers to appreciate the female form in a new and unconventional way, celebrating its inherent beauty and power.

— John Manno / director

This series was shot over almost twenty years. My interest is in capturing the true personality and sense of who the model is. I use traditional 8 x 10 B&W film in a homemade oatmeal-box pinhole camera to create wide-angle distortions with the cylindrical focal plane. The familiar becomes unfamiliar, the ordinary extraordinary. By then replacing the black-and-white values with subtle hues through successive pulling of curves in

Photoshop, I interact with and interpret the image. I photograph the model nude in her own home, apartment, or studio, surrounded by her possessions for two-minute exposures. A collaboration between model and photographer, the images attempt to reveal an intimate portrait of the subject.

— Dan McCormack

website

BIO:

I began to make multiple images of a nude in a grid in 1967 while beginning my MFA Thesis in Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The thesis was an exploration of Set Theory math. In grids of 5x5, 8x8 or 10 by 10, I found numeric rules to order the photographs — not design or composition rules. I have been photographing the nude for over 50 years, exploring different cameras, processes and techniques. From the beginning of my work with the nude, I have been interested in making an image that says something, not being just a pretty image. I came back to grids in 1992 when I combined 24 images made with the Nimslo Camera. Again later I created a series using a Grid with the Action Tracker Camera in 1999. I worked with a pinhole camera from 1998 to about 2018. Later I focused on the Nude at Home theme as at the model’s home everything that was in the image was a part of that model’s identity. With the Pinhole camera I would make an image using 8x10” film in a Quaker Oats cereal cylinder and the exposures would take two minutes. Often many of the images were ruined by the model’s movements. But this was a successful project because of the special moments that were successfully captured.