John & Geraldine Lilley Museum of Art
Reno, Nevada
The Lilley Museum of Art is located on the main campus of the University of Nevada, Reno.
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The Pinhole Project mission is to document the people, art and events at Burning Man each year, with teaching others to explore their creativity through this hundred year old technique of pinhole photography. With pinhole photography, the “lens” is merely a pinhole, created from a thin sheet of aluminum, and affixed to the camera body. The Pinhole Project exposes 30 x 40 inch sheets of light sensitive gelatin silver paper. The project works with 12 pinhole cameras, created out of 50-gallon cardboard barrels. This size is uniquely suited for capturing the incredible scale and immense diversity of art and culture at Black Rock City. Under the red safelights of the darkroom, photosensitive paper is inserted into the camera body. Exposures range from 40 to 300 seconds, where concentrated beams of sunlight are funneled through the pinhole and into the camera, creating a negative image of the recorded subject. The project maintains a desert darkroom in a shipping container, where they gather to processes, develop and fix about one hundred photographs each Burning Man.
