Day Eighteen - Suzanne Fossey

Since graduating from Norwich school of Art & Design in 2001 I've been self employed, doing social documentary photography for a living.

When lockdown arrived earlier this year taking most weddings with it, I finally found the time to commit to my first love – experimental photography.

So 2020 has seen me gathering beer cans found in local hedgerows and empty tins found in the cupboards of friends and family, and turning them into pinhole cameras. I use light sensitive photographic paper instead of film, and develop the paper negatives with traditional dark room methods.

There’s no viewfinder on these extremely low-tech cameras; no lens either, just a hole made with a pin. Each of the cameras I’ve made require anything from 5 seconds’ exposure, which makes for some interesting and unpredictable results. Leaving the cameras out in all weathers for many weeks results in streaks of light across the page created by the sun’s passage. These are called ‘solargraphs’ and for me they’re a magical reminder that we’re all floating on a rock in an infinite universe, rotating around our sun. They help to change my perspective, and remember what’s real.

'A two week long exposure of the ruined tower

of Great Melton’s old church, made with a

home made pinhole camera'

I remember the day I left the little tin camera at the foot of the cross in front of the churchyard's ruined tower. It was a gloriously sunny day, followed by many days of high winds and rain.

When I returned to the site a couple of weeks later, the tin was face down in the gravel. I don’t know how long it’d been that way, but before it fell it managed to record at least a few days of sunshine in one position before the winds nudged it into another, making a second exposure over the first.

You can see more of Suzanne's wonderful pin

hole camera creations at:

Instagram @suzanne_fossey_art

Facebook @suzannefosseyart

www.suzannefossey.co.uk

Today's church door...

St Andrew, Framingham Pigot

View

With my unapologetic bias towards Victorian Gothic architecture, expectations for St Andrews were high. I was not disappointed. From the outside it is distinctly different from most other churches in the county. Its stone north tower has a real romantic air about it which would not look out of place in a Grimm fairytale.

Back to Countdown