History
Photo
The First Pinhole Photographs Sir
David Brewster, a Scottish scientist, was one of the first to make pinhole photographs,
in the 1850s. He also coined the very word "pinhole", or "pin-hole"
with a hyphen, which he used in his book The Stereoscope, published in 1856. Joseph
Petzval used the term "natural camera" in 1859, whereas Dehors and Deslandres,
in the late 1880s, proposed the term "stenopaic photography". In French
today "stenope" is used for the English "pinhole". In Italian
a pinhole camera is called "una fotocamera con foro stenopeico". In
German "Lochkamera" and "Camera obscura" are used. The Scandinavian
languages tend to use the English "pinhole" as a model – "hullkamera"/"holkamera"/"halkamera",
though "camera obscura" is also found, and is the term preferred by
myself in Norwegian.
Pictorialism
and Popular Pinhole Photography By the late 1880s the Impressionist
movement in painting exherted a certain influence on photography. Different schools
or tendencies developed in photography. The "old school" believed in
sharp focus and good lenses; the "new school", the "pictorialists",
tried to achieve the atmospheric qualities of paintings. Some of the pictorialists
experimented with pinhole photography. In 1890, George Davison's pinhole photograph
An Old Farmstead (later called The Onion Field) won the first award at the Annual
Exhibition of the Photographic Society of London. The award was controversial
and led to a schism in the Photographic Society of London (soon to become the
Royal Photographic Society) which resulted in the formation of the well-known
pictorialist group, the "Linked Ring". George Davison's picture is reproduced
in Renner (1995:42), and in some histories of photography, e.g. Michael Langford's
The Story of Photography (Oxford: Focal Press 1992. p. 106), The Magic Image.
The Genius of Photography, edited by Cecil Beaton and Gail Buckland (London: Pavilion
Books Ltd. 1989. p. 79), and Naomi Rosenblum's A World History of Photography
(New York: Abbeville Press, p. 310). Pinhole photography became popular
in the 1890s. Commercial pinhole cameras were sold in Europe, the United States
and in Japan. 4000 pinhole cameras ("Photomnibuses") were sold in London
alone in 1892. The cameras seem to have had the same status as disposable cameras
today – none of the "Photomnibuses" have been preserved for posterity
in camera collections. Some years earlier, an American company had actually invented
a disposable pinhole camera, the "Ready Photographer", consisting of
a dry glass plate, a pinhole in tinfoil and a folding bellows. Another American
company sold "the Glen Pinhole Camera", which included six dry plates,
chemicals, trays, a print frame and ruby paper for a safelight. The very first
commercial pinhole camera was designed by Dehors and Deslandres in France in 1887.
Their camera had a rotating disc with six pinholes, three pairs of similar sizes.
Pictures of these cameras are found in Renner (1995:43). Mass production
of cameras and "new realism" in the 20th century soon left little space
for pinhole photography. By the 1930s the technique was hardly remembered, or
only used in teaching. Frederick Brehm, at what was later to become the Rochester
Institute of Technology, was possibly the first college professor to stress the
educational value of the pinhole technique. He also designed the Kodak Pinhole
Camera around 1940.
Nick Dvoracek's collection of historical articles
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