Rosanne Olson's pinhole photographs make the world stand still

Most photographs are made in the instant of a shutter's click, recording only a thin moment in time.

Seattle photographer Rosanne Olson has expanded that tiny window, taking pictures where exposures last for 10 minutes, 20 minutes or more, a long enough period of time that the photographer can sit and watch and wait and even talk to people while the camera is recording a single picture. Olson - a free-lancer who does more conventional photography for commercial and fine-art clients - has been recording travel pictures around the world for the past four years using a pinhole camera. That's an old-fashioned, low-tech approach to photography, more in tune with the 19th century than the 21st. A pinhole camera uses a tiny opening - a pinhole - in place of a lens to focus light on the film. It works, but it requires long exposures.

The results of Olson's pinhole obsession were exhibited in Eugene this week at the PhotoZone Gallery.

"I realized I was tired of doing things the same way," Olson said. "I wanted to try something different. I guess I picked something that was pretty labor intensive. It's also been an interesting procedure. Because of its laborious nature, everything takes a long time and much consideration. As I'm slowly working somewhere like Paris - exposures take 10 or 15 minutes - I get to really get absorbed in the environment and meet people who wander by and wonder what I'm doing with that odd-looking camera."

Her odd-looking camera is, in fact, a 4-inch-by-5-inch view camera that has a pinhole where a lens normally would be. Olson shoots her images on black-and-white film, Polaroid Type 55, enabling her to see each image as soon as it's captured. Pinhole photographs have a softer, more ethereal look than conventional photography. They also don't record action well, so that even if people walk through a scene being photographed, their images generally don't appear - leading to an entirely depopulated landscape.

Olson has taken her camera to Paris and Venice, London and New York, the lavender fields of Provence and a simple church in Mexico. One day, while photographing a North Dakota wheat field, she set up her camera on a large tripod and was waiting for an exposure to finish when the farmer drove up in his pickup truck.

"He kind of drives down into the ditch, across the field, to where I am crouched in all this scratchy wheat," she said. "He looks at me, and he looks at me. I smiled at him."

"He said, `What in the hell are you doing?"

"I am taking a picture of a hay bale."

"He just rolled his eyes and drove away."

Olson's pinhole work is featured in the December issue of Photo District News, a trade publication for photographers. Her work is also on the cover of the recent Communications Arts Photography Annual. Farrar, Straus & Giroux used her pinhole images on the covers of a new series of books containing the writings of the contemplative Christian monk Thomas Merton.

A graduate of the University of Oregon Journalism School, where she received a master's degree in 1981, Olson worked as a part-time photographer at The Register-Guard from 1982 to 1986. While in Eugene, she covered primarily features and "soft" news, indulging her preference for a style of photography heavily infused with art. Olson still tries to create that blend today, she said, doing both fine art and commercial work. "My goal all along has been to merge the art and the commerce. When I get commercial jobs I try to really orient it quite a bit to the artful end of the scale. I'm a very lucky girl in that way."

Dec. 31, 2000