The Review

Issue date: 2/26/08 Section: News

Media Credit: Courtesy of Nancy Breslin Nancy Breslin used a pinhole camera to capture her photo, "Tea at the Mad Hatter Cafe in San Antonio."

Photography professor Nancy Breslin is being featured in an exhibit named "Intervals" with Casey Orr, a professional photographer from Leeds, England at the Visual Arts Center at San Antonio College. The exhibit, which focuses on intervals of time, will run through March.

For the past five years, Breslin said she has been using a pinhole camera to capture passages of time she has spent at restaurants, coffee shops and amusement parks. She said she bought the camera on an impulse and thought it was beautiful.

Different from other cameras, the pinhole camera has no lens, but its tiny opening needs very long exposure time. The exposure time can range from seconds to more than an hour, depending on the amount of the light hitting the scene.

Breslin said she has an on-going, online journal called "Squaremeals: A Pinhole Diary of Dining Out" that records meals she has shared with family and friends. She said she decided to use the name "Squaremeals" because the images created by the camera are square, rather than standard rectangular photos.

Rebecca Dietz, curator of the exhibit, stated in an e-mail message that she chose to feature Breslin and Orr together because they both incorporate a sense of time in their work, but each with a different take.

Orr's work documents her nine-year journey by canal from England to her birthplace in Chester, Pa. Her portraits of the land and sea show the parallel between her journey and the flow of goods and people across the Atlantic in the past.

In contrast, Breslin's work is part of her lifestyle. She has been creating this collection for five years and is continuously adding photos that expose her social life when dining at restaurants and visiting amusement parks.

Dietz said each of Breslin's images captures an interval of time from start to finish. During each interval of exposure, waiters and waitresses are shown bringing food to the table, heads nodding back and forth in conversation and utensils moving. The pinhole camera does not allow the user to control what movements it is catching, which in effect produces a surprising result.

"Ghostly faces, light trails and softly blurred forms stand in stark contrast to stable lights, windows and doors as the film records changes in light and movement on a single frame," she said.

Continued...

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