Michael Falco

“Everything Suspended” by Michael Falco

Have you ever visited a place and come away feeling like it was a dream? Have you tried to capture that feeling with a camera and come away disappointed?

My career as a photographer has been dedicated to capturing this perceived “feeling,” and I have discovered that the pinhole camera has unique abilities when it comes to rendering this illusive impression.

This ongoing series of images collectively entitled Everything Suspended, is an exercise in capturing this transcendental feeling we experience when exploring landscapes.

When we explore a landscape, the experience is multi-dimensional – including not just visuals, but the smells and sounds of the landscape. At times, with so much information flooding our senses, these encounters in nature, and in the landscape around us, can feel almost dream-like.

When we photograph, we reduce this multi-sensory world into two dimensions. Something is invariably lost in the process. The pinhole camera’s lens-free view – the actual obscuring of the scene – allows the true feeling of the landscape to come through.

By layering the imagery in-camera, these multi-exposures seem to exponentially increase this impression or feeling in the final image.

The genesis of these images, spending mornings and afternoons shooting long pinhole exposures of cloud formations, was a zen-like pastime. Re-exposing the film with additional subjects felt more like cliff diving.

Drifting veils of clouds are merged together with iconic subjects ultimately suspending the viewer in a multi-dimensional realm. These final images are two or more moments brought together and suspended like a memory of a time or a place.

Click here to read about pinhole cameras: https://www.falcopinhole.com/pinhole-cameras

This is a link to a video explaining this work