Film Intro – Letters to the Landscape

A box was found in an attic, along with old photographic equipment, containing family photographs, letters and over 300 postcards of Brontë Country.  Polaroids, pinhole photographs and a map were also found in the box. This film is inspired by this collection.

Title still from my current PhD project

Letters to the Landscape is an epistolary diaologue and travelogue exploring the relations between Brontë Country and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. The artist uses various strategies including polyphony, narrative, autobiography and the intimate. The essay incorporates postcards, letters, pinhole photography. digital photography, found images, found texts and Super 8.

Pinhole experiments

Notes: It is proving extremely difficult and time consuming to get an accurately exposed shot from the pinsta camera. The camera only uses sight lines for composition, it throws out a really wide depth of field, apparently it likes being placed on the floor. Pre-flashing with a 1000 lumen flashlight for 30 seconds saves a significant amount of time when exposing. For the bridge for instance I placed the camera on the ground very near to the edge of the bank but it still picked up a lot of foreground. Because of the nature of filmless photography the image comes out in reverse. For the image of the tree we used a tripod between 2-3ft high and because the light was really bright I did not pre-flash and I set the paper speed at 3 (the light affects the paper speed i.e low/poor light 1, strong light 3, bright light sunny day 6), we exposed for 2 minutes and the image as you can see is over exposed.

Brontë Bridge, f229, speed 1, pre-flashed, exposure time 7 minutes
Penistone Hill, f229, speed 3, tripod, not pre-flashed, exposure time 2 minutes