Stranger
by Jamie House

“My practice focuses on producing imagery using mail art and pinhole photography to examine the role of the `stranger` in society and why we are interested in people we don’t know. These images show chance encounters and intimate double exposure visual portraits of people who have not met in person and only meet by the mediated gaze of the pinhole camera. This relates to the way we interact remotely with others in the information age.”

“These images were a result of me sending a call out over the internet for people’s mail addresses. When I received the participant’s addresses, I sent them a pinhole camera disguised as a parcel and asked them to take a portrait of themselves and send it back to me. Then I took a portrait of myself. The resulting imagery is a ghostly spectral trace of two faces with their physiognomic features merged.”

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We welcome Jamie House to aamora as a guest artist. Jamie is a socially engaged, practising photographer who uses pinhole cameras. He collaborates with people worldwide, from established artists such as Jo Babcock and Justin Quinnell to emerging talents. Jamie uses the collective power of mail art to realise his ideas and empower people.

Jamie’s latest project “Stranger” is a collaborative pinhole photography project that examines the role of the stranger in society, collaborating with people across the globe. Jamie has used pinhole photography and mail art in previous projects such as his Pinhole Parcel Project where he constructed cameras disguised as parcels and posted them around the world, mapping the world with light.

Jamie is a conceptual Pinhole Photographer and also a camera Obscura builder. He tells us: “I recently built England’s largest camera Obscura.

Jamie’s work is currently exhibited in Goa International Pinhole show, travelling to New Delhi, Mumbai and Goa.

For an interview with author of the Pinhole Camera, Brian Krummel in Hub magazine, click here.