(Workshop) Sténopé / Sinope - Adina Mocanu

The French word for pinhole camera is sténopé — almost identical to Sinope, the nymph who gave this city its name. A pinhole camera is a box with a single aperture through which light negotiates with darkness over time. There is no lens and no filter, only the collaboration between human intention and the agency of matter.

Working with the local association of photography and participants from the community, the workshop invites app. 20 people to build their own cameras from simple boxes and photograph a shared subject: what they see through their own window — their particular threshold between interior and exterior world. A window is already a liminal object: it separates while allowing vision, frames the world without containing it. A pinhole camera photographing a window is a threshold photographing a threshold.

The process embraces long exposures, glitches accidents and light and time as active agents in shaping each image. Each participant has one box: their own sténopé, a vessel they constructed themselves through which they negotiate with the world on their own terms.