Poetics and Pinhole Photography

Did you know that the last Sunday in April is Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day? I didn't either, too bad, because it would have been fun to participate. Oh well, next year! Over at their website you can learn all about how to make a pinhole camera yourself -- a neat project for kids -- and you can look through a gallery of photographs taken by participants in Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day since 2001. There are even workshops and events being held all around the world. How fascinating! As we all go digital, it is interesting to see how to take photos manually with a camera you've made yourself out of something as ordinary as an oatmeal box. (although you can apparently convert your digital camera into a temporary pinhole one as well!) You can even download templates to make a camera as wacky as this SPAMera, over at Photojojo!

Anyway, all this investigation of pinhole photography made me wonder if there were any Canadian poets writing on photographic themes. I recalled faintly that there might be something about it in Stephanie Bolster's 1998 Governor General's award-winning collection White Stone: the Alice poems. Yes -- and here it is -- this collection is made up of poems about Alice Liddell, and the infamy thrust upon her by Lewis Carroll's attachment to her and her influence on his Alice in Wonderland. It's a wonderful set of poems, do try to find White Stone --reading it all at once is fantastic.

APERTURE, 1856

First the flood of chemicals:

guncotton, ether, silver

nitrate. Then forty-five long seconds

of stillness--and she only three

and quick. Did they meet because

of a raising of eyebrows, curiouser

about each other than about anyone

else in the garden? Her sisters

blurred into foliage;

he smelled of medicine. He was

twenty-four, did not choose her

as his favourite until the Adventures

six years later. But something began

that afternoon, marked in his diary

"with a white stone."

Her blue eyes tight buds.

Her mousy thatch straight across

the forehead. Spring everywhere threatening

to open them both: tense in that unfurling

garden, during the long exposure.

Stephanie Bolster

After his first meeting with Alice Liddell on 25 April 1856, Charles Dodgson wrote in his diary, "I mark this day with a white stone." The expression originates in Catullus' "Lapide candidiore diem notare," (Poem 68, line 148) which translates as "to mark with an especially white stone the (lucky) day." The English version was quite commonly used in Victorian times.