E.M. Cioran and Thomas Beckett, in a conversation brought back from the first one in \"Exercises of admiration\" (Adelphi, 1988), are confronted on like translate, from the French to English, the title it of the teatrale text Sans of the same Beckett.
To the end the Irish writer opts for the term lessness, neologism that he invents for the occasion in order to render one infinite and deprivation mixture, one synonymous emptiness of apotheosis and that with directed reference to just the literary text.
Probably neither Cioran neither Beckett reminded the English term lensless in its photographic meaning (without disc of a valve) with which it connotes particular half technical of resumption and exactly pinhole .
But the involuntary analogy between the two words is extraordinary in how much lessness appears to be the philosophical application of lensless.
Lacking any mediating element (the lens) to give the subject before it a final form or organization, the camera’s hole breaks down reality into an obscure, symbolic portrayal, where darkness hovers at the edges while light is directed to the centre of the image.
This absence of the lens’ mediation prevents the picture benefiting from a series of formal aspects which one would expect to find in conventional photography, the most important being focus.
But not only that, the perspective lent by this means is no longer of the type devised by Brunelleschi, the range of focal length becomes unrecognizable, the mass ratios are unknown, the objects in the picture take on totally incongruous proportions, the subject is often blurred by paradox and a strong sense of disorientation pervades.
So, in the end, the pinhole photographer is a sort of unlimited voyeur, in the sense that he or she is compelled to look at everything that stands before the camera yet, at the same time, see nothing of what the camera (or rather, the hole) registers visually.
The situation is peculiar, but maybe one of the (many) creative possibilities of this practice lies in the very dyscrasia between what is beheld and what is seen.
A pinhole camera is not concerned with time as an instant, does not have to face moments of decision, however true or false they may be; this kind of camera appreciates the absolute sameness of one moment and the next and reveals the state of things, from a truly symbolic perspective; it works (due to the often very lengthy exposure times) in a situation in which time is stretched, where the past is not yet the past and the present is not quite the present either.
Again, pinhole cameras perceive the emotional charge of the photograph in relation to the circumstances and appropriate it, giving the resulting pictures an often extra, unexpected bonus; the photo and the pinhole camera become a single entity.
This information should help you understand today’s pinhole pictures: but the discussion would not be complete without looking at this form of photography as a form of “dark photography”. Pitch black shadows alongside blinding lights, the depth of its tones, a kind of visual tunnel generated by the light falling away towards the picture’s edges, cryptic subjects, morbid themes, the uncertainty of the vision: all these aspects lend a veneer of mystery to these magical, dreamlike icons, intrinsically linked to the archetypes of our individual or collective memory.
Lessness, after all.
Massimo Stefanutti
Lessness & Lensless