What is the project?
Homelight aims to explore domestic spaces through long exposure pinhole photography made by a participant, and other images made by the photographer, Jo.
The project aims to take a slower more in-depth look at domestic spaces, challenging some of the modern world’s instant image making. To do this it strips photography back to a basic box and paper prints. The participant makes photographs using a pinhole camera, and the photographer makes them with a more complex lens camera but a similar method. There are no negatives, nothing is a duplicate. Everything is original and unique.
The project is based upon the premise that you can get to know someone better when you experience their home. The photographer will use this opportunity to experience the participant’s domestic space and get to know them better. The participant will use it to explore themselves and consider how they see their domestic space and how it may be seen and experienced by others.
The images will be shown alongside other homes and will encourage an audience to get to know various participants through their spaces, to consider what we think of as domestic space and how we make ourselves vulnerable when inviting others in, and to contemplate how we make photographs and the effect that time can have on images.
How are the cameras made?
The cameras the participants will use are pinhole cameras made out of wood to be used with a classic 4x5 film holder. Rather than film, direct positive paper will be loaded into the holders.
The cameras are designed to be beautiful objects in their own right when they are not being used as cameras. With the film holders in them they are cameras. Without, they are boxes. Each has been made by hand for each participant and their home, and the participants keep the boxes at the end of the project. They can then do whatever they like with them. Use them as money boxes, bird houses, tissue boxes, or keep their use as cameras.
The boxes have been made in my own home and then taken to the participants’ homes.
Where can I see the images?
The current aim is to not make the images available online, but in an exhibition.
More information on this soon.