Making pinhole work begins before any picture: it begins with building the apparatus. How large the box should be, where to put the hole, how many hours to let the light in. Each of those decisions settles what the image will be.
The eight chapters below are the record Okamoto wrote for his 2025 solo exhibition. More of what is preserved here is what did not work than what did.
01 / PROLOGUE
Prologue
A pinhole camera uses no lens. Light entering through a small hole is projected directly onto the inside of a dark box, and that is the image. Place a light-sensitive material inside — film or photographic paper — and the landscape records itself. What makes it compelling is that so simple a structure can produce an image of surprising precision.
What drew me to the pinhole camera was wanting to photograph time. I tried to layer several moments into a single frame with an ordinary camera and could not get it to work. I had the idea of using a large camera and exposing at intervals, but I was stuck on whether that meant I needed a large lens — and then I happened to come across “pinhole camera” on Google. Learning that a hole is all it takes to make a camera, and that the size is entirely up to you, gave me a shock and an elation I still remember. That is where making work with pinhole cameras began. The first thing I built was a camera roughly the size of a light truck. I lined the inside with 42 sheets of photographic paper and exposed them at staggered times; that series became my first work.
02 / DIGITAL ROOM
The Digital Room-Camera Years
If you can stand inside a large camera and see the outside world projected there, then — I thought — could a room itself become the camera? I covered room 38 of the Sawada Mansion with blackout cloth and projected the view outside onto the fusuma. Working digitally brought the exposure down to about 40 minutes, but digital cameras at the time were poor at high sensitivity, and long exposures left obvious noise — the grainy pattern that appears in the image. I found the noise came from the heat the camera generated, and tried cooling devices and packing it in ice, but neither improved it enough. In the end it was techniques from astrophotography, together with image-processing software, that finally produced a digital room camera I was satisfied with.
03 / FILM ROOM
The Film Room-Camera Years
Long digital exposures generated a great deal of noise, and correcting it on a computer never sat right with me. So I took on the challenge of photographing the projected interior with a large-format film camera. At first I could not get it to work at all, and spent about a year on trial and error. During that time I happened to pick up a book by Abelardo Morell in the shop at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, and realised I had been miscalculating the exposure. A pinhole camera admits so little light that exposure time matters enormously. I extended the exposure from two hours to eight — and at last the photograph came out as I wanted.
04 / DIGI-CARDBOARD
The Digi-Cardboard Years
When a whole room becomes the camera, the landscape falls across the ceiling too, and it feels like being in another world. But long digital exposures can leave an artificial impression from the image processing. To remove that, I made the box smaller and shortened the distance to the hole. The image grew brighter, and the exposure came down to two minutes. A pinhole camera is dark and soft; a digital camera is bright and sharp but weak in low light. Combining the two weaknesses let each cover for the other, and I began to see new possibilities for what could be expressed.
05 / GOING BIG
The Years of Going Enormous
By around 2013 digital cameras had improved a great deal, and high-sensitivity shooting produced far less noise. From then on my attention shifted: instead of projecting the pinhole image onto something, I wanted to project it onto the landscape itself. The wish to take in the world outside on a larger and wider scale kept growing, and the cameras grew enormous in step with it.
06 / PREDECESSOR
A Message from a Predecessor
In 2013, at the exhibition “The Sun of Manhattan” at the Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts, I encountered the work of Nobuo Yamanaka. As a pioneer of the pinhole camera, his experiments and his way of taking hold of light impressed me deeply. The cover of the exhibition catalogue had a small hole in it, and I used that hole to make a camera. Until then I had thought only about cropping the landscape projected inside the camera — and then, by chance, the camera's own hole appeared as part of the image. It was an unexpected discovery.
07 / BICYCLE
The Bicycle-Camera Years
I wanted to photograph the view outside and the hole itself at the same time, in one frame. From that wish, a new kind of camera-making began. So that even a large, heavy camera could be moved freely, I arrived at the idea of putting it on a bicycle. Once that freedom of movement existed, I think the way I photographed became lighter too.
08 / BIG PINHOLE
The Big Pinhole Years
With an ordinary pinhole camera, the aim is to make the hole as small as possible and obtain a sharper image. But if sharpness is what you are after, I thought, why not use a lens camera? One day I walked into a dim room and found blue and brown light faintly falling on the floor. The door was acting as the pinhole, and the apartment building opposite and the sky had appeared on the floor. A large hole can be a camera too. In the indistinct outlines and the ambiguous light of that soft world is where I have come to find beauty.
09 / NOW
Now
The path that shrinks the hole in pursuit of sharpness and the path that chooses the softness of a large one rest on the same principle. The apparatus is still being revised.