Mark McLoughlin Verisimilitude

First Floor FLUX Gallery, February 5 - March 19, 2011


2010 Exhibition Award Winner

Artist Statement

The pinhole camera represents a retreat from the wealth of options available in modern photographic technology. It is an exercise in restriction, a deliberate paring-down of the image making process. Using a hand-built camera with paper as a negative returns the medium to its nascent period of simple light gathering.

Over the past 15 years I have constructed a variety of pinhole cameras in order to explore themes of time, memory, taxonomy and process. The contact-print positives in each series reveal an expansion of time, in direct opposition to the frozen moment of a modern snapshot. The softness of the pinhole format leads the viewer away from the "evidence" of sharp detail in favor of suggestion or nuance. It is a way of seeing that relates to the broader theme of temporality: ways of using time as a marker in order to understand our place in its passing.





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