In his series Anteroom, James Nizam
has turned the interiors of abandoned,
soon-to-be-demolished homes into
room-sized camerae obscurae. He
achieves this by fitting a makeshift
lens to a hole he made in a wall, or
attached to a hole in garbage bags covering
a window. He then photographs
the results with a 35mm camera,
creating chaotic-looking images that
presage not only the photographed
structures’ imminent destruction but
also the tenuous future of analogue
photography itself. Nizam’s work in
this series suggests reasons for the
pinhole camera’s increasing popularity:
it’s a format that looks to the past
as a way to consider the state of the
medium today.