Walter Crump Pinhole Photographs and More..., Boston, MA

Interview with Walter Crump by Fern Nesson
On my pictures.

I was born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina in 1941 and I lived there until I was 18. I was somewhat withdrawn and a rebel, I guess you might say. When all my friends were going off to college, I just didn't want to do it., I think that if I had lived a little later, I would have just gone to California and lived in Haight-Ashbury. But that wasn't an option so I joined the Navy.
            In the Navy,   I had plenty of time to read and pursue other interests. When I came back home, I went to Guilford College in North Carolina for two years, and again got bored with school. Two of my friends, Ed Lee Oliver and Frank Carlton were headed for Boston so I went there with them.
            In Boston, to make some money, I agreed to model for art classes. Through modeling, I got to know some of the professors and teachers. I had always drawn as a young kid. I was encouraged by a great Aunt and my mother. The more I modeled, the more I just had this urge to draw and I asked some of the teachers if I could draw in their classes. So I'd model in one class and draw in next class. They just sort of made room for me and gave me encouragement. After about the fifth class, I really begin to get a form that I liked.
            The next year I enrolled in Boston University Art School. After I got my BFA, I took a job as a replacement teacher for painting and printmaking at the Commonwealth School. Printmaking was on the fourth floor and drawing and painting was on the first floor. Often I taught both courses at the same time, running up and down the stairs, exhausted. Finally I told the headmaster, that I could not go on like this and he hired a painting & drawing teacher, while I continued to teach printmaking. In 1984, I agreed to teach photography as well. I had never been in a darkroom and for the first three years the students pretty much taught the technique side of the course while I learned. The more I watched and observed what the kids were doing, and tried it myself, the more interested I got. Photography presented me with a new vision and a challenge that was inspiring and exciting, So I took beginning courses at the Worchester Crafts Center in Zone photography (Is this right ??– I took courses at the Worchester Art center and studied Zone photography), Zone photography is, in the Ansel Adams tradition , the use of creative metering to obtain a full spectrum negative (I changed this, but I am not sure it adds anything, what do you think?). We were taught to pay a lot of attention to metering, to preconceive your image before you even take it.
Then one day, all my photography equipment was stolen from my car. Since I knew I would not get my cameras back right away, I decided to make pinhole cameras.(which may have caused Ansel to turnover in his grave). At first, I used large cylinders which I cut in half, These were cardboard Sona tubes, that they use to make cement pillars. This appealed to my basic male- kid-thing of model airplane making. I liked constructing the cameras in a very sort of low-tech way, without any drawings or plans though sometimes I stuck on little shaky eyes and crusted paint and things like that

The early cameras were very basic, a cylinder with a cap on it, taped together either with masking tape or silver aluminum tape. They were a kind of aesthetic trash. I didn't think too much about how they looked merely how they worked. I put a handle on them so I could carry them. When people saw them, they didn’tknow what to make of them.
I remember once, I was carrying a bunch of cameras around. And some guys who were just starting on the Big Dig walked by. "What are those? The plans for the Big Dig?" I said, "No." I said, "They're pinhole cameras." And one guy said, "I remember making one in high school, in physics class." And we had this wonderful conversation about pinhole cameras. This kind of underground experience in art, often prompts really interesting connections on the street.
And after a while, I began to find a kind of a pinhole camera that worked for me. Recently I have been treating pinhole cameras as assemblages, collaging on fragments of old photographs, kitschy ribbons and almost anything else I can find.
(I changed this - original……making them from almost anything I can find)
Although the range of my work since that time has been very eclectic, this book focuses on my pinhole photographs. I have done several series of pinhole photographs: the Troll series, taken beneath bridges; the ” Through Fences." series and the "From the Ground Series, shot by putting the pinhole down on an object that exists in the environment and just seeing what happens.
            The tradition and concept of the camera obscura or pinhole camera dates back to China 5,000 years ago. A Chinese philosopher/writer/poet had a room that had a hole in it, and no windows. One day he saw the city projected upside down on the opposite wall and was dumbfounded. And so he wrote these wonderful, probing kind of poetic reminiscences about how this happened, and a kind of scientific treatise about what happens with the light. Later on another Chinese philosopher picked up on this, and did some experiments
with it.
            From then on the camera obscura concept winds through art history. Da Vinci talks about it a bit. In the Renaissance, pinholes were used by artists, to organize three-dimensional imagery onto a two-dimensional surface.
            In a traditional camera, the lens converges light to a very minute point on the film plane and only that point is in focus. And as you move further out from the film plane, backwards and forwards, that point becomes more of a circle of light than it does a point and the focus blurs. This is how we get depth of field. It is the way our eyes work, as well although we’re not aware that we're looking at most of the world out of focus because our brains put everything back in focus. But if I stare at one thing, peripherally everything will be soft and out-of-focus.
A pinhole camera works differently. The image it creates is in focus from (the omit?) very, very close up to (the omit?) very, very distant (infinity). The trade off is that a pinhole image is softer than that of a lens camera. A pinhole sends a little cylinder or a wire of light through a pinhole. It doesn't converge at all and doesn't reach the point of focus of refinement that a lens does.   A very small cylinder of light touches the film plane which gives a softer image than a traditional camera . The pinhole is made by using a needle to drill a hole through a piece of very fine brass or aluminum. And you can get different sized needles, or have different sized pinholes, depending on the distance of your pinhole to the film plane.

             Another pinhole quality is that it compresses time. Using a traditional camera, the shot is instantaneous and you catch just a minute slice of life. Exposures from a pinhole camera occur over time, it is a film on a two dimensional surface so that it melds concepts we often separate into one category or another.
            To me, Pinhole is attractive because it is intuitive, beyond the mathematics and physics of lens-making. Some pinhole photographers love the science of pinhole, they seek to get the exact quality of a lens camera, but I am impressionistic.
If I make a small camera, I use a small needle. If I make a big camera, I use a bigger needle. I like experimenting, and not knowing quite how it will come out?
            Everything I do is a controlled accident.   I don't want to be in perfect control. I am an artist not a scientist. I find adventure in the discovery that happens along the way. The art is allowing for accidents and making use of them.
          I'm always looking at things that don't quite work wondering how to make use of them. It’s like John Cage who said that “If he heard something that didn’t sound beautiful, he’d wait a while listen to it again, and it would sound beautiful."
I question the idea of right and wrong in art. I'm not against all traditions that can be kind of a dogma in itself. But I think when one is open-ended, seeking the unexpected, it's not a mistake; it's a door to something new.
            This is why I love pinhole. First of all, you don't have a viewfinder. You don't have a light meter. You have nothing that tells you what's happening. And when you use a cylinder you don't know exactly what needle size to use, because some of the negative is really close to the pinhole and part of it is far away. The light comes in through a little hole into the tube and it exposes differentially around the cylinder.
This doesn’t happen with a regular camera, because it has to have a film plane to focus on. A pinhole is in focus all along the line. Something can be close on the film plane, and something else could be far away, but you'd get pretty much the same exposure time, same focus.
Another esoteric thing about a pinhole cylinder (camera) is that when the light goes through the pinhole (lens), it hits the back pretty much as a circle. As it moves around to the side, that circle becomes an ellipse. So you get imagery that is warped and bent. A pinhole changes imagery into something unexpected. It mythologizes an image or puts it in another realm. When you look at it there's a familiarity to it, but also a newness, or unexpected quality.
I choose specific subjects for pinhole as well. I drive around the city, looking for little nests of places. Sometimes these are grandiose buildings but for the most part, they're back alleyways, hidden places in the city . These places that might just seem to anybody else, mundane. Sometimes they're very intimate places, close up, and other times, they're vistas. I choose things that I think that the pinhole will warp in an interesting way.
For example, my fences series lends themselves to kind of an unexpected way of seeing the world. You have this fence close up and then the distance, that is also in focus. There's a kind of interesting dichotomy between these two scenes. Any time I see a fence, I think, what's behind the fence and why is it there to keep me out?.
            I'm more attracted to old run-down parts (areas?) of the city. Places I'm drawn to contain buildings that are over 100 years old: parts of the South End; lots of South Boston, along the waterfront. The older the better. It dovetails with my appreciation 19th century photography. I like nineteenth photographers whose work has an ethereal quality like Nepice exposing a street of Paris from his window all day, or maybe two days. The photo showed an empty street in busy Paris, because nothing stayed there that long. And it's very contrasty, and it's almost not there because it has faded over time.
            Unlike a traditional camera, I’ve only one shot, exposing one paper negative at a time in the pinhole camera, then its back to my studio to reload or develop the negative. Unlike film, I cannot do a whole lot of manipulation of the paper negative. With film, you can manipulate the contrast but not a paper negative. (I changed this around some) ,
            Instead I do a lot of manipulation of the print. I often take it out of the developer and wash it off before it's fixed. And therefore, all the silver in the developer is still active. Sometimes I paint (with) developer to give a border to the piece. I sometimes atomize developer or fixer on the piece, again to add a kind of compositional element, or give it a sense of having aged, or something like that. Also, by leaving it out, the unexposed areas, the white areas, turn yellow. And when you develop it, it turns kind of a yellowish orange, and when you fix it, it turns yellowish-ochre.
I've also done something, very capricious. Once in a while, it works. I'll take it out of the developer, and sandwich three or four prints together, put them on a piece of cardboard that is also saturated with developer, put it in a black plastic light tight bag, I try to do this just up to the point where the gelatin begins to deteriorate Over time, it silverizes, and the two images stuck together create all of this kind of nuance of texture are created And one out of 10 works as a composite image, It's a little bit daunting sometimes.
I haven't quite decided if I really like it or not. But it’s a type of accident that allows something else, some kind of chemical processes beyond my control, to make the image.
Once it's fixed, I wash it for a long time, hang them up to dry. Then, I may work for three, six months producing a number of images from various negatives. I set up my darkroom with a series of toners with four or five different toners and a bleach bath. And then I just play with them.
Bleaching is like painting in reverse. Instead of adding, you're removing. It (can be) scary, because when you make a mark, with bleach on a brush (painting the bleach on with a brush), you don't see exactly what happens. And then when you fix it, it goes away even more, so you have to kind of preconceive what might happen.
Finally I tone them. I’m always looking for a combination that I haven't come across, that produces an unexpected quality. There is an excitement and joy when something magical happens. I'm not sure what that more is, but I think that's what probably drives me as an artist to continue working.
It possible to ruin a print by too much fiddling around. From one negative, I may print six or seven prints. After I've toned them, I may have two or three that “work”.
My prints are unique. I don’t do editions. I find this a much more exciting way to work. It’s monotonous to print 30 prints of the something. I guess you could say I’m
obsessive-compulsive; I like the convoluted process of this. I think part of my focus on accidents comes from being dyslexic, and therefore seeing the world in an unusual way

Color in Relation to Painting
Presented at Meditech in conjunction with a two person exhibition including my recent paintings

WE CAN HAVE VERY DIVERSE ATTITUDES TOWARD COLOR and its use in art. We can embrace color, be enthralled by its prescience or we can be suspicious of it.
When looking at a painting by Bonnard, Manet or Turner or viewing a film like “Snow Falling on Cedars” we are enthralled by the color or more precisely the intriguing relationships of color. Such works can take us to a rarefied place. Roland Barths talks of color as “a kind of bliss, a closing eyelid, a tiny fainting spell
In the Nineteenth century, establishment painters had categories for different characteristics of artmaking – line, form and perspective were considered masculine traits, color was considered a feminine trait – a patina that served to enhanced but not dominate the masculine aspects of a painting.
Thank goodness the Impressionists came along and put an end to all that – or did they?
When the Sistine chapel was recently restored, there was a big up roar, many scholars & artists thought it had become too colorful.
We cringe when viewing a 1940s Black & White Film Noir that has been colorized. Paradoxically I have viewed films that I swear I remember seeing originally in luminous Black & White only to learn later that they indeed were originally filmed in color. What does that say about my attitude toward color?
And then why do artists prefer to dress in black? Why not dress in the colors of Ragistani women who wear combinations of intense saturated pinks, greens, reds and blues.
My homage to color in dress is to wear little accents of color in the form of colorful t-shirts and suspenders. In the winter I ware colorful scarfs. I am always on the lookout for uniquely colored t-shirts and socks . When I travel, I comb the bazaars searching for that unique colorful & patterned scarf. Otherwise its subdued grays, blacks and muted colors for me.

Though the human eye can detect millions of nuances in color, we have very few basic names for colors or names for color variations and relationships. We have a very limited color vocabulary. The anthropologists, Brent Berlin and Paul Kay established in 1969 that all natural languages had between 2 & 11 names for basic colors and with a consistent hierarchy. A language which has just two names for colors, those colors were black & white, languages with three names, those colors were black & white and red. And so on to the 11 colors– black white yellow red green blue purple brown pink orange & gray. This is a somewhat unorganized grouping consisting reasonably of black white & gray as well as the primary & secondary colors, but where does pink and brown fit in? Russian does not have a name for pink as a basic color but has two distinct names for blue. Vietnamese & Korean make no distinction between blue & green. The French words for certain colors – violet, brown for example do not exactly correspond to the English brown & violet.
Ad Reinhardt remarked that – and I quote:” matt black in art is not matt black, glossy black in art is glossy black. Black is not absolute, there are many blacks.” (end quote)
Of course our modern high tech consumerist’s culture needs an almost infinite reservoir of names for all the colors we consume, in packaging, products and paints. Never fear, there is a whole industry carefully constructing new names for all the colors we consume. Here are some of the names of new colors. I am quoting from the Glidden Pamphlet of Exterior Paint Color Combinations: copyright 2005:
Desert Warmth, Sonora, Bird Song, Exclamation Point, Cat Grass, Club Monaco, Obsidian Glass, Rum Raisin, Spiders Web, Square Dance, Fountain Sprite, Shooting Star, Icebreaker, Play House Plum and Widow’s Walk just to name just a few. . You can get a quart of Glossy Fountain Sprite, or a gallon of matt Square Dance, or a pint of luster Rum Raisin, but we better be careful or we may be slapping ice cream or soft drinks on our walls. Perhaps I am venturing too far a field.
Adrian Stokes said (and I quote), “An object is red or yellow on the one hand, on the other it shines, glitters, sparkles” (end quote) So how does a painter first of all develop a working definition of the infinitesimal combinations of color and then use these combinations in a somewhat rational constructive way, while all the time taking into account a lot of other stuff as well. The paints an artist uses are not so much known by the color but by the pigment that makes the color. – Alizarin Crimson, Cadmium Red, Naples Yellow, Burnt Umber, Ultramarine Blue, Pthalo green. An artist knows the specific qualities of each of these pigments which can be transparent or opaque, saturated or not, permanent or fugitive. Artists know how these pigment ‘work’ and how they relate to and interact with each other. When painting an artist is not so much thinking exclusively about color but also about texture, opaqueness, transparency, and who knows what else.
When you view a painting, aside from its imagery, form and structure – those “masculine traits” you are viewing a unique surface, a topography of not only the color relationships but a surface that could be either thinly painted or built up with heavy impasto brush strokes or more likely combinations of both., We might be unconsciously aware that the painting has a lot of glazing (transparent layering) or that it is constructed with bold opaque colors. It can have shinny reflective passages or matt sections that you could almost fall into. Today the look of this complex surface of color, texture and layering is I think as important as or even more important than the images it contains. It is the signature of the artist - and holds the story of the making over time of the painting. You could think of the surface as crystallized time –With the advent of digital imagery with all its positive aspects and there are many, a digital image has as yet to produce a surface that has a unique stamp – a topography that is the significant signature of the maker. A digital image is flat and uniform, when magnified; it has a mechanical surface. The surface of all digital images looks the same.

You can do a lot in Photoshop or other imaging software with a digital image, in most cases, much more than one could do in the darkroom. But there are “personal” touches and manipulations that can be affected in a darkroom that will never be replicated by software. These ‘personal ‘touches and manipulations produce a photograph that is unique – only one exists. That is until you scan it on to your computer. With new technology something is gained and something is lost.
When the printing press was invented and books were more widely distributed, the interest in and consumption of illuminated manuscripts increased. Perhaps history will repeat itself in reference to paintings & photography.
I am both a painter and a photographer, but beneath those labels I could be called an alchemists - one who believes that with the mysterious intervention of external random forces something spectacular may be formed. I like accidents, mishaps can often open new doors and lead to new and enriching ways of thinking about and executing ones work Say you accidentally scratch a painting or a negative and your heart sinks, oh but wait a minuet, if you add a few more scratches here and a few more scratches there, something magical happens and the work becomes richer and more interesting than it’s previous incarnation.
To that end, I make pinhole cameras. They have no view finder, no light meter. No f stops or focusing controls. Many are cylinders or half calendars – the negative is placed along the inside circumference of the camera. I can’t predict what these cameras will capture. With conventional cameras, I like to make in-camera double exposures – you might say I am going against the laws of physics by having two objects occupying the same space at the same time. Again with double exposures, what is captured is always a surprise. At times, admittedly, with both of these mediums and others, you get an unpleasant or uninteresting surprise. But often enough something magical and wonderful happens.
As a painter, I pretty much do the same thing. I start a painting with no preconceived ideas. It is a bit like striking off on a journey with no predetermined destination. It’s the journey, not the destination that I find fascinating; In making a painting, it’s the process that I am attracted to. I begin by layering a number of mediums in order to build up a surface that eventually begins to look interesting to me. I am beginning to get to know the painting to have a relationship with it, which will both blossom and wilt as the painting progresses. We can, the painting and I, at times, become very close and have an exciting relationship and at other times we can become very disappointed or frustrated with each other wanting to go in different directions and if things get too testy we need to have a temporary separation. But in the end we usually get back together and after a lot of hard work we become one.
I tend to work on a number of paintings at the same time. While working on large paintings which take a long time, I also work on small miniature paintings almost always on odd objects with interesting surfaces. I guess the most bizarre objects I paint on are clumps of used paper towels which are impregnated with shellac – Crump Clumps; they look to me like fossels, fossels of trash, yes, but never the less fossels. I also paint on empty Polaroid film containers, mangled plastic drink bottles, I painted on dried fish once but the odor became a bit too much. A lot of these small paintings are on found pieces of metal which I call street iron - metal that has fallen off cars & trucks and been pummeled by passing vehicles. These metal fragments were once a part of a new car or truck with a proud owner. This shiny clean car took families to places, ran errands, transported tools and equipment, fresh new drivers took it on dates, it was a place to explore new relationships, or endure worn out ones; a shared familiar space for old friends and partners of many years.; then finally it was sold and then resold and sold again eventually becoming a dinted tattered utilitarian thing, somewhat unreliable , but it mostly it got you there, shedding parts of itself along the way, which lay in the street pummeled continuously by passing traffic waiting for me to rescue it; sometimes risking my life dashing through busy traffic in order to gather up these discarded fragments. Folded and buried somewhere within these paintings of debris are resonances of the history of it’s original functionality.
As you may have guessed, I seldom throw anything out. My studio is a somewhat organized collection of useless but I think interesting objects, trash and junk from recent and past eras. It is a cabinet of curiosities, though unlike the eighteenth & nineteenth century ones full of rare and valuable objects, my collection is worthless but in my eyes priceless jewels.

I was a figurative painter and printmaker for much of my career. but I have always had an interest in non objective painting. And though I attempted abstract painting a number of times, I didn’t feel connected with the paintings I made; I hadn’t found a personal vocabulary which allowed me to grow as a painter. It wasn’t until my wife and I viewed a large exhibition of Indian miniature paintings at the Met in the mid nineties that something clicked. There was a school of miniaturists who used as a decorative element in their work, a paste made from beetle wings. These were little dimensional dots of luminous glittering color. I was captivated and began to apply small repeating points of pigment on the surfaces of distended and shellacked photographs. When I felt confident enough, I discarded the photographs and began to make completely nonobjective paintings applying small points of pigment over complex surfaces built up through many layers. Why nonobjective? Why not! The painting as the object.
Today, after decades of the art world’s hesitation to label of any thing ‘beautiful’, and it’s romance with minimalism, conceptual art, performance art and installation work, to name only a few recent and not so recent styles, schools, fashions & trends, there seems to be on some level a resurgence of interest in paintings, tactile art objects and once again ‘beautiful’ is tentatively being used in criticism and descriptions of work. These are also the times when artist’s mediums and attitudes about art and aesthetics sensibilities are swiftly shifting, changing and evolving. It is an open time where almost anything goes – it is a good and challenging time to be an artist.

Collaborations

Pinholes & Plastic
Camera Photographs

Paintings

Pigment Print

News/Events

November 4 & 5, 2007

Open Studios