Isle of Wight What's On Guide: 2024 Events OnTheWight

Dark Chamber: Billy Childish, Dave Wise, Nhung Dang & Wolf Howard

27 Apr – 26 Jun 2011

Exhibition

Dimbola Museums and Galleries

Terrace Lane
Freshwater Bay
PO40 9QE

01983 756 814

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Dark Chamber: Billy Childish, Dave Wise, Nhung Dang & Wolf Howard

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Scull childish

Friday 1st April 2011 to Sunday 26th June 2011

Dark Chamber is a new exhibition of pinhole photography which opens at Dimbola Lodge on 1st April 2011. The exhibition brings together a selection of photographs by Billy Childish, Nhung Dang, Wolf Howard and David Wise.

In recent years there has been a renewed interest in analogue photography. Pinhole photography could be described as the most elemental of all photographic disciplines and these four artists have been at the vanguard of a movement towards a more committed and betrothed approach to art and taking pictures.

Selecting pinholes made over the past decade Dark Chamber aims to reveal something of the daily lives, travels and interests of the respective photographers.

  • Dave Wise - Dave, a travel writer, utilises pinhole photography to document his travels to disparate parts of the world, drawn by a desire to engage the viewer in the same wonder and simple beauty he finds in the world.

  • Wolf Howard - Wolf has been taking pinhole photographs based around his life in Medway for the past ten years. Says wolf – “I enjoy the gentleness of it. I patiently take my pictures and often feel slightly out of sync with the surrounding, busy world”. Wolf is also a poet, painter and musician.

  • Nhung Dang - Nhung’s portrait photography evokes another era, weaving a dreamlike sense of nostalgia into an imagined human history. Pinhole appeals to her instinctive nature as a photographer and with a focus on creating atmosphere over technical precision, each image conveys a narrative of her own personal sense of melancholy and yearning.

  • Billy Childish - Billy’s photography work is embedded in his 'view of the hidden self', which is consistent, and runs parallel to his work as a painter and confessional poet.

In a world dominated by digital manipulation and the instant delete button, the photographs in Dark Chamber are a simple expression of people’s desire to regain the mystery of photography as expressed in many computer and mobile applications offering analogue effects. (It is somewhat ironic that the height of digital technology offers the approximation of what it promised to make redundant i.e. analogue photography and film.)

Despite its charm, Dark Chamber is not a romance with times gone by, but a conscious decision by the artists to embrace limitation, thus forcing an engagement with the subject and conscious intent that is highly unlikely to occur using a digital camera

Dark Chamber is a glimpse into a world where the living appears ghost-like, or simply disappears, and familiar landscapes become ancient and mysterious, as if giving up their hidden truth.

There is beauty, simplicity and rawness in pinhole photography that modem technology has been unable to better. The limitations of a pinhole camera are its strengths: there are no tricks or gadgets to hide behind, apart from photography itself.

Dark Chamber is showing at Dimbola Lodge on the Isle of Wight from 1st April 2011 to 26th June.

'Scull' By Billy Childish