Through a Glass starkly

Cosmo Flying Disc.

If you have seen a man throwing a green frisbee in parks around the city, then running after it with a large black bag, the mystery is answered in an exhibition at Anna Miles Gallery.

The frisbee was a pinhole camera, one of dozens photographer Darren Glass has made since his first experiments at Elam art school 15 years ago.

"A pinhole camera is organic, it has a relationship to the human eye," Glass says. "There is no focus - with a camera you have to focus. I can also have total control over the device - although in making the photo, control goes out the window."

The key to pinhole cameras is the relationship between the size of the hole and the distance to the film or photographic paper.

Glass' cameras have included a converted wheelie bin, which he rolled around town to take long duration pictures of buildings directly on to photographic paper, and a large plastic doughnut with holes punched at random around the outer rim.

He was attempting to make panoramic images of the city from the top of Maungawhau Mt Eden with the doughnut camera when he changed his mind and rolled it down the crater.

"Every time it went through a revolution I got streaks. It suggested to me the idea of using the sun as a drawing tool."

That led to the frisbee-cam. Over the past year, Glass has been out every couple of days throwing his frisbee. He tried to throw it at different times of day and with different cloud and light conditions. The ideal was to throw it with no hover on a sunny day, so the fixed point of the sun would burn spirals or concentric rings on the film.

Sometimes the frisbee-cam would go off course and hit the ground at an angle, even shaking loose the film a couple of times.

In some of the prints you can make out the grass blades where the frisbee-cam ended up, and even features Glass leaning down to shove it in the bag.

Glass has shown 90 of the images in the exhibition, which he dubbed Belly to the Ground, a term for the way horses in motion were painted before Eadweard Muybridge's photographs showed they always kept one foot on the ground.


Exhibition


What: Darren Glass, Belly to the Ground

Where and when: Anna Miles Gallery, 4th floor, 47 High St, to Feb 26