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Master Photographers Tell You How

Craig Barber: Ghostly Landscapes by Sarah Coleman Using a variety of pinhole cameras, Barber adds a sense of quiet, gentle tranquility and melancholy to his images Article rating: 8.57

Click here to read Craig Barber's Ten Tips for Better Landscape Photography

When a landscape photograph is described as “haunting,” it’s often because the place it shows seems isolated and unknowable, in a way that provokes anxiety. Craig Barber’s landscapes are haunting in a different way. Shot on pinhole cameras with long exposures, the images are quiet, gentle and a little melancholy. Looking at them, we feel how the passage of time has affected a particular place, and how the moment that’s been captured is fleeting and delicate. 

Barber grew up in upstate New York, in a small farming community that has since been subsumed into the suburbs of a nearby city. Seeing the landscape of his youth give way to strip malls and subdivisions led him to his current project, where he’s documenting abandoned buildings and disappearing ways of life in rural New York state. In these images, abandoned vacation cabins, crumbling mansions and an overgrown basketball court all stand proud, hints of their former glory glimmering through their current state of decay.

A similar quest to recover a lost past led Barber back to Vietnam, where he’d served as a combat marine during the Vietnam War in the 1960s. Beginning in 1995, he visited the country several times, traveling around by bicycle and motorbike with the bare minimum of equipment as he looked for landscapes that would help him come to terms with his past experiences.

In Vietnam, Barber encountered many people who wanted to talk know about his history with their country. “It was incredibly cathartic: I think it was one of the wisest things I’ve ever done,” he says. His images of Vietnam were published in 2007 as the book “Ghosts in the Landscape.” Many of them are made as diptychs or triptychs, which involved using two or three pinhole cameras at once. Sometimes, Barber placed the cameras at right angles to each other so that they captured different aspects of the same landscape, adding another layer of complexity to the image.

This method of image-making is something Barber arrived at after first shooting landscapes more conventionally. He studied photography at Everett Community College in Seattle, and never intended to use pinhole cameras indefinitely, he says. But after using them for a project on gardens in Seattle, he never looked back. “I like the lack of pretension of this equipment,” he says. “It’s not all wrapped up in technique. Instead of obsessing about your aperture and focal length, you can try to capture how the place feels.”

In addition to Vietnam and New York state, Barber has photographed extensively in Havana, Prague and the American South. In each place, he says, he tries to rid himself of preconceived ideas, and to view the landscape with a fresh eye. Sometimes, people who wander in and out of the frame during his long exposures leave traces of their presence as ghostly blurs on the negative. Barber calls them “poltergeists,” and likes the way they make the finished image unpredictable. “When it works, it’s a wonderful addition to the image,” he says.

Barber loves the fact that pinhole photography involves very simple, home-made equipment. But it isn’t always easy, he says. Light can leak through the camera box, causing streaks on the negative. The drill bits he uses to make his pinholes are wire-thin and can break easily, and his sheet film (Ilford HP5 and Kodak Tri-X 400 ASA) can run up to $15 per sheet for a 12’ x 20’ negative, making mistakes costly. And he points out that the method “has its limitations. I couldn’t use it, for example, to photograph a sporting event.”

Still, he’s in love with the medium, particularly for the way it makes him slow down and contemplate each landscape with a Zen-like mindfulness. “With pinhole, you work in a completely different way than you would with any camera that has a viewfinder,” he says. “You have to slow way down, and accept that you can’t control everything. It’s a process that holds a great sense of wonderment for me.”

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I was so really amazing to Mr. Barber i like to take like that pcture but i would like to study or learn more about his photo Posted by: Lily J. Molino Nov 10, 2008 @ 5:46 AM EST

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