Process Driven 10: Jon Wilkening

When I was a junior in high school I took my first photography class and one of the things we had to do before we got to shoot with the “real” cameras — in our case, they were Pentax K1000s loaded with Tri-X — was to build a pinhole camera from one of the round Quaker Oats boxes. And I remember thinking how incredible it was to see the simplicity of what photography is: light and time. Not even a lens — just a strip of gaffer tape covering a tiny hole in some tinfoil. But there we all were, toting our oatmeal boxes around making pictures. Then we would go into the darkroom and print little positive contact prints from the paper negatives and I’ve gotta tell you, it was alchemy. For us, the pinhole camera was just a stepping stone to get to use an SLR. In this episode, I’m talking to Jon Wilkening a photographer in Philadelphia who uses pinhole as his preferred platform for communicating his creativity. For Jon, pinhole is his tool of choice for expressing his point of view. Jon calls his work “the blurry middle between photography and painting.” His pictures are terrific and it all started sort of by accident.

LINKS
Holga Pinhole Camera
David duChemin
Ernst Haas

CONNECT WITH JON
Website: jonwilkening.com
Twitter: @jonwilkening
Instagram: @jonwilkening

MUSIC
Please Listen Carefully
 (Jahzzar) / CC BY-SA 4.0