Adrian Blackwell

Adrian Blackwell Evicted May 1, 2000 (9 Hanna Avenue) Gord Anderson's Studio 2000

In 2000, Adrian Blackwell documented a series of studios at 9 Hanna Avenue, just before everyone was evicted.  9 Hanna had once been a munitions factory: huge steel-mullioned industrial windows, inexpensive, voluminous.  As with all studio buildings, they happen only when there isn't a more lucrative use for the building, a day that inevitably comes along, in this case the first of May, 2000.  Blackwell's thirteen Cibachrome contacts (20" x 24") were printed from the film lining a pinhole camera which was fixed to the ceiling of each studio.  Each camera was scaled to the proportions of the room below, and lined with film on the four sides and back of the box, thus recording the entire space.  

They are up right now at EyeLevel, an exhibition at Pith Gallery in Calgary.  One sees a row of fat cruciforms, filled with such warm complexity that they glow like icons.  Because pinhole camera exposures can be long, people often appear to be drifting through the spaces photographed as if they were phantoms, which of course, shortly after the photo and then the eviction, they became.  

The pinhole camera is the lowest of photographic technology.  Once the image is captured, much can be done with it at increasingly sophisticated levels, but the original light on film is photography at its very essence.

When I registered with Corbis to use a photograph of the Ho Chi Minh Trail after a US bombing raid for the last issue of On Site, they sent a little gift: plans for a pinhole camera you download, cut out and fold together.  Now that everyone has a digital camera, there is a rise in the use of the pinhole camera.  Very curious.