about

The pinhole camp has been creating large-scale portraits with festival participants since 1999. The pinhole came about of the desire of four first time participants to contribute in a unique and lasting way to the ephemeral pleasures of the playa.Each year, we build, operate, and burn a van-sized walk-in pinhole camera/darkroom. As we have grown, so too has our belief that this device is the reason that we make our annual pilgrimage. As we have evolved, so too has the camera, not only in functional and technical capabilities but also in its role as a seed of meaningful engagement with other participants.

The pinhole camera is posited as one possible answer to certain questions which essential to places like the playa: what is the nature of 'documentation' on the playa? And how can one transform the exploitative nature of a relationship with a 'subject' into interplay between the documenter and the documentee where the result is a record of something that might otherwise have never come about?

Pinhole photography on the playa seems inevitable. It is a medium that engages swaths of time, where clouds stretch across the sky and the endless chatter of movement melts away. It can extract an essential stillness from the world through a primitive apparatus of reflected sunlight passed through a minute opening.

We believe in this process, and we hope that our belief and our creations embody what it is that drives us all on the lifelong journey of creation that flowers each year on the playa.