Yuliia Belska, curator of the Pavlovka Pinhole Festival in Ukraine, celebrates the playfulness, surprise and magic of pinhole photography.
Since 2017, Pavlovka Art Gallery in Kyiv, Ukraine, has hosted the annual Pavlovka Pinhole Fest. The festival began with a pinhole photography exhibition which only took up two small rooms and due to the popular response from both the public and artists, I thought: “Why not make the festival bigger?” and it gradually grew to a larger gallery. The festival now hosts artists from all corners of the world.
Pinhole photography is the oldest photographic technique. There is no other photographic technique in the world that runs a red thread through the whole history of mankind, that helps to reflect, comprehend and create an alternative visual culture, and feeds on collective archetypal memory.
Its roots go back centuries to the time of primitive man who, through a tiny hole in an animal skin curtain, saw an inverted image on the wall of a cave. Modern cameras work on the same principle. In the 5th century BC, followers of the Chinese philosopher Mozi were inspired by this phenomenon and described the appearance of an inverted image in a dark room.
Today, pinhole photography is popular all over the world, from Patagonia to Colombia, Chile to Japan, from Scotland to Greece. A pinhole camera can be made from anything: a box, an iron, a tram, even an airplane…
As a photographer and curator, I am fascinated by pinhole photography because it attracted me with its playfulness, surprise, some magic of the image – a combination of qualities that makes this photographic technique so special.
At the opening of this year’s festival, one of the photographers told me that his attraction to pinhole lies in its unique property – the equal depth of field across the entire frame. He explained it as that both a reflection, ”in the eye of a cockroach and the Andromeda Nebula can be seen in one photo.” Everything else, in his view, can be achieved using any other technique.
But I do not agree with this statement.
Because all the charm of pinhole is precisely in the combination of qualities: depth of field, long exposure, blur etc. The beauty of pinhole is its simplicity. At first glance, just a small black box, the simplest photographic system. In fact it is a great mystery, the magic of the image. Add a little imagination, and in our hands is a powerful art tool.
At the Pavlovka pinhole festival our goal is to unite artists around the world who use pinhole photography in their work. This is the only Ukrainian festival that introduces the achievements of the worldwide pinhole community to the wide audience. The festival promotes pinhole photography and presents this cultural phenomenon to the public, giving the artists an opportunity to share their artworks, grow the community and engage young people in photography.
In 2018 the festival hosted Polish and Hungarian pinhole weeks. In 2019 Lithuanian and Belarussian pinhole exhibitions took place as part of the festival, in the course of which the influence of cultural and mental peculiarities on the work of artists were explored.
For example, we saw that Polish photographers gravitate towards dark tones and images with a pronounced mystical flair. Belarusians, on the contrary, appear to be more open, prefer light colors, their photographs are balanced and calm.
In 2020, despite the coronavirus epidemic the festival was held with the theme “Love in the time of Cholera”. Using photography as a tool of magical realism, we explored intricacies between love and the transience of being, interspersed with the distortion of time, or even, its collapse. We invited artists to open the veil and, through a pinhole, show what is most important to them.
As the curator of the festival, it was my honour to select photographs for the Pavlovka Pinhole Photography Festival Retrospective at Aberdeen Maritime Museum. I found this task very difficult as over 100 photographers from more than 30 countries have participated in the festival over the years.
Symbolism came to the rescue – the number 13. This is the date of birth of Pavlovka Art Gallery, the date of the first exhibition, which took place in November 2015. We present to the audience a slice of the festival – photos from 13 artists from different countries.
And continuing the course of existential topics, this year we invited the artists to think about the topic I, bridge-builder. Initially, it involved finding answers to questions about how we establish connections, how we play on stage in order to live in this world. But due to the hostilities in Ukraine, the subject has changed. Now the main message of the festival is “Who am I in this war?”.
Who am I, in a world being swallowed by war? What am I doing here? How did I get here? How do I bridge the gap between peace and war?
Today the world is under threat of a third world war, and a thin thread is in our own hands, that can turn into a steel bridge spanning from war to peace, in the hands of each and every one of us. Today we are hostages to the situation, but we have the power to change it and stop the meat grinder of war.
Humans are creatures nurtured by society, and are forced to play by society's rules. War has its own rules, but today, thanks to global networks, muses can still sing while the guns roar. They must not be silent.
Today it is important for us to try to change that part of society which is an age-old quagmire of strife, socio-economic conflicts, wars, non-acceptance of otherness, peculiarity and the needs of the particular individual.
But how is this affecting the current art scene in Ukraine? Now, unfortunately, there is only one topic in Ukraine – military. I follow the situation and see that in Europe, too, the majority of exhibitions are being held with the topic of the war in Ukraine.
In the current war situation we find ourselves in, photographers face particular problems on their way to creativity. Although it is not comparable in scale to the grief and loss that my people are experiencing, it’s worth mentioning regarding the “state of photography” at the moment. Right now, creative acts in public spaces are highly restricted and are met with suspicion and caution. Taking pictures on the street requires special permission from the authorities. And a decision to go out to take some picture with a beer can in the city or anywhere where people might see you, can end up in the police or face other unpredictable consequences.
At the same time, people are getting tired of the horror that comes from reportage photographs from the battlefields and destroyed cities. Of course, all this should be captured for history, but at the same time, no war should deprive a person of the desire to look at something else, but horror. And those who are engaged in alternative photography and any other kind of creativity, can fulfill the need of people to remember that the world can be a beautiful place and be worth living.
I believe that our festival hits the mark. It speaks of the horrors of war, but the visual picture is devoid of these horrors, because it is not a direct photograph, but the author's rethinking of events.
Our weapon is photography, a little black box carrying rays of light and peace.
