I would like you to meet “crappy box” :

Without ritual, life lacks meaning. Whether it be a drink every evening at 5 to celebrate the day conquered, or watching the playoffs each season to show pride for your hometown… the little things we assign significance to reward us with moments of privately observed fulfillment.

The last Sunday of April each year is World-Wide Pinhole Photography Day. On this one day, people take strange, unique and beautiful pictures with hand-made cameras and then submit one to an online gallery archive. When you think about it… this is a pretty frikkin awesome thing. Somehow every April thousands of people all over the world remember to try out their newest pinhole creation or photographic technique and then upload a single image to represent an idea from their life on that day. It’s a collaborative snapshot of the world as a whole, and its become one of my life rituals.

I should probably mention that I hate photography. I hate it. I took black and white back in high school and never really grew to love the process. There were too many variables, too many smells, and at the end of the day… my self developed images just didn’t look interesting enough to warrant all the fuss.

So why is this different?

Long ago… when I was still a young college beast, I crashed a number of my friend Keith’s art classes one semester. Regardless of being enrolled or not, I decided I was going to do all of the projects he assigned particularly if they were things I didn’t think I’d like doing. Building a pinhole camera was at the top of that list for me.

Along with the rest of his class, I built myself a Populist from a cereal box, loaded it with film, and started taking arbitrary pictures with it everywhere I went. By the time I got to the end of the roll… I came to really care about the exposures inside my crappy box, because they represented a journey I had gone on stitched together by blips of moments I’d otherwise have forgotten. When I dropped the roll off to be developed, I stressed myself into a ball hoping those memories survived and were more than a blurry over-exposed mush… mishandled by the Walgreens photo department.

The camera did work which made me happy, but that’s not what made the experience important. Some of the exposures didn’t turn out as I had anticipated. The ones I spent a lot of time eye-balling and setting up were less interesting than some of the ones I just took without aiming at anything special. A lot of the exposures overlapped and created weird effects that weren’t intentional, but awesome.

Just as unexpected as my favorite pictures on that roll was the weird transformation that had occurred in my head while toting around my camera. I started out passive and by the end of the process really enjoyed the times I stopped to steal a moment in time. So much so, that when Keith boasted about pinhole day, I jumped on board and took a picture for the occasion:

Since I led into this post talking about the importance of personal ritual I wish I could wrap up stating that I’ve been participating every year, – BUT the honest truth is that I have not. I have however taken the crappy box with me everywhere I’ve moved in the past x amount of years, knowing that one day it would live to take pictures again…

And this was the year. I had to remember how to load the thing with film and perform tiny bits of maintenance just to get it to work again, but I’m glad I did. It brought me a ton of joy to go through the motions of the forgotten pinhole ritual… and I have really awesome vintagey images of my robots! Now to decide which one to submit for the Pinhole Day gallery this year:

Another cool thing I noticed was that many of my pictures from 2010 were of robots (I like robots), but they were of little stationary models and statuettes that I built. This year I took pictures of robots I’ve made again, but they’re REAL big kid robots that actually do robot things.

So, what’s it about to me?

Life often turns out differently than we were lining up. Sometimes in spite of careful planning, all is lost and there is nothing to show for your efforts… though occasionally, you get a happy accident that works out better than anything you could have schemed or organized. Either way, *and I’ll shamelessly quote Rush now*

…THE POINT OF THE JOURNEY IS NOT TO ARRIVE…

So find the meaning in everything you do while you’re doing it.

Exposures from last week (spring 2015):

Exposures from spring 2010:

As a final note, I scanned my negatives on the same machine I used back in ’10. (Thank you, Keith!)