(Workshop) Sténopé / Sinope - Adina Mocanu

The workshop invites participants to make their own cameras from simple boxes and photograph a shared subject. In French, the word for a pinhole camera is sténopé—almost identical to Sinope, the water nymph who gave the city its name. A pinhole camera is a box with a single opening, where light negotiates with darkness over time. There is no lens, no filter—only a collaboration between human intention and the agency of matter.

Organised together with the local photography association and participants from the city, the workshop invites around 20 people to build their own cameras from simple boxes and photograph a shared subject: the view from each participant’s own window—their personal threshold between the inner and outer worlds. A window is already a liminal object: it separates while allowing us to see; it frames the world without containing it. A pinhole camera photographing a window is one threshold photographing another.

The process embraces long exposures, glitches, accidents, and chance, acknowledging light and time as active agents in the making of each image. Each participant has a box of their own: one they have made themselves, their own sténopé—a tool they have built with their own hands through which to engage with the world on their own terms.