This photographic series is created using a handmade pinhole camera. I sought to recapture my childhood memories. Memory is in everything; from personal objects, to collective, social and public memory which can reside in community traditions, artefacts and archives. Memory can develop from rituals and practises and also from storytelling, song, and performance. We do not remember days, we remember moments, and these specific memories are places I visited while growing up around West Auckland, many you may recognise.

 

Pinhole imagery has been said to be photography’s equivalent of drawing with chalk. These recaptures are exposed onto 8x10 paper negatives giving them a dreamlike feeling. Pinhole alters your original perception of a space. The changing of light, the movement of objects in the wind, the infinite depth of field and the low-fi quality of lens-less black and white paper, all change the image in ways you could not imagine while taking the shot. These elements encompass the notion that memory is highly subjective, boundless, skipping years at a time, combining multiple events into one, and twisting facts irrationally.

 

Things are things, people are people. Objects are mute and inert, and people are interacting and speaking with each other, and yet both can be ‘memory objects’, able to unlock feelings, recollections, and maintain a connection with the past. Individuals keep things because we have imbued the objects with experience, emotion and identity and this is experienced while playing with the ViewMaster. These 3D toys were introduced in 1939 and became an overnight sensation. You may remember seeing Mt. Rushmore or that cartoon mouse. The viewer embodies personal meaning to me, which symbolises my private and particular life moments. Regardless, everybody looks.