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Arts

Small lens, big picture

Tampa's past comes alive when it is captured by the pinhole camera of Rebecca Sexton Larson and layered with other elements.

By LENNIE BENNETT
Published August 7, 2005

[Times photo: Joseph Garnett Jr.]

Using a cotton swab, Larson paints over a large print of Ybor City casitas, building up the details. She’ll sew it to another large-scale print of the brick street running in front of the houses, and add poetry and other, smaller photographs to the finished work.

	[Photo courtesy of Rebecca Sexton Larson]
	Rebecca Sexton Larson photographs the casitas in Ybor City. The small row houses, which were inhabited by immigrants in the 1900s, have been restored and are open to the public for tours.
	[Times photo: Joseph Garnett Jr.]
	ABOVE: Larson with her pinhole camera fitted with a precision laser lens and Polaroid film. BELOW: In her darkroom, Larson makes a small print that she will sew onto a larger one for a photo mural about Cuban cigar workers, part of her photographer laureate project for the city of Tampa.
	[Times photo: Joseph Garnett Jr.]
	Larson has completed some of the photographs for the project, including this statue of Emma Hampton in Woodlawn Cemetery. She painted the figure and sewed photographs and drawings of plants there onto the bottom. Also pictured is Hampton’ s husband. Larson says she chose them for subjects because of the monumentality of the sculptures and an interesting detail: They face west, away from the city, because they had a disagreement with politicians and decided to turn their backs to them when they were buried. The hand-sewn slashes represent the number of Union and Confederate soldiers buried there.
	[Times photo: Joseph Garnett Jr.]

TAMPA - The dust collecting in the sky high above Tampa recently, blown from the Sahara and creating a haze under the sun, was good news for Rebecca Sexton Larson. She set up her camera, a small wood box outfitted with only a small lens, on a sidewalk in Ybor City and in the filtered light captured a gauzy image of the Victorian-style casitas, the small row houses inhabited by immigrants during the early 20th century.

Larson, 45, is Tampa's photographer laureate for 2005, commissioned to create a body of work that will document the city.

Since the program began in 2003 as part of Tampa's public art program, photographers have created portfolios in their distinctive styles, the only common denominator their mission to record the life of the city.

Larson's photographs fall more on the art than craft side of the medium. Collectors prize her large black and white prints, which she paints over, adding cryptic, handwritten words, or threads with embroidered poems.

As photographer laureate, she will produce at least 15 such mixed media works of locations that range from Woodlawn Cemetery to the Goody Goody Diner.

"I'm interested in the story of places," Larson says. "Not so much in people."

The pinhole is the oldest kind of camera, a version of the camera obscura used in the Renaissance that consisted of a lens fitted into a light-free box. The light admitted through the small hole projected an image of a scene that an artist could trace and then transfer to canvas. Later, light-sensitive paper was added so the image formed on it, and the camera was born.

Larson began using a pinhole camera 15 years ago out of necessity.

"I always wanted to make large photographs," she says. "But I couldn't afford the kind of camera needed for them.

At the time, she worked for the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office making training videos and then the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center as a medical photographer. She graduated from the University of South Florida in 1982 with a double major in mass communications and art, with a focus on painting.

"But I never painted once I left school," Larson says. "I always loved hand-painted photographs, so I was doing small ones and showing them at outdoor art festivals. That's where I found out about pinhole cameras. I found a group that made them and learned I could make big negatives with them."

A big negative is important for oversize photographs because, in the enlarging process, the entire image stays in focus. Pinhole cameras can accommodate Polaroid film, which produces both a positive image and a large negative without the expense of a large-format camera.

But pinholes have limitations. Unlike most cameras, it has no shutter or f-stop to control the light as it enters the box. Larson says there are formulas to determine how long to expose the film, but she relies on her experience and intuition.

Because little light enters through the small hole, longer exposure time is needed. The soft, ethereal quality produced by a long exposure, rather than sharp details, suits Larson's style.

Pinholes don't have view finders either, so Larson sets up her box camera at the angle and location she thinks she wants, rips the protective paper from the film, looks at her watch, guesses it needs about 20 seconds of exposure, then pulls the film from the box, letting it develop for about a minute. She separates the photograph from the negative, dunks the negative into a bath of sodium sulfite to "fix" the image, then puts it into a rack submerged in water to clean it and keep it from getting scratched. The beauty of using Polaroid film is she has a positive image on the spot that tells her if the shot she got is what she wants.

In this case, the photograph of the casitas is perfect, their stark white wood nicely contrasting with dark tree branches and enough gray sky to give a pleasing variety of halftones.

It's an efficient process requiring none of the heavy gear hauled around by most professional photographers. Everything fits into a small canvas tote.

Larson is among the dwindling number of photographers not using digital cameras, which operate without film and eliminate the need for darkroom processing. Larson's darkroom was converted from a one-car garage attached to the west Tampa house she shares with her husband Matt, a creative marketing manager with the Tampa Tribune, and their dog Sprocket.

She uses an enlarger to project an image onto a 30- by 40-inch sheet of light-sensitive Luminos paper (fiber-based with the rough texture of watercolor paper), which she tacks to a wall. Then it's put into a developing bath to produce the image, a stop bath to halt the process, a fixer and finally a tank that runs clean water over it for about an hour. After that, it's hung to dry.

The casitas will be machine sewed to an equally large print of the street in front of the house, a closeup of old bricks that looks almost abstract. Larson likes the effect added by the visible stitching. She will also sew on smaller photographs of figures on a nearby statue commemorating the Cuban immigrants, and a Burgert Brothers vintage photograph of Cuban cigar workers that she downloaded from city archives and from which she made a new negative and print in her format.

She paints the prints with oils, using Q-tips and cotton balls - "plain old drug store variety" - sometimes adding lines with pencil. On the bricks side of the work, she plans to stitch in a poem by a Cuban writer, which she hasn't yet selected.

It's a process that takes weeks to complete.

Larson's one-of-a-kind works sell for $5,000 and more. So the city is getting a bargain, paying her $25,000 for the series, which she says will probably be more than 15 finished mixed media photographs, as many as 25.

At this point in her artistic career, which is now almost full time, Larson could afford a fancy camera. But she isn't tempted to buy one.

"I'm so used to this. The f-stops and shutters, I don't think I'd know how to do it."

Besides, she says, when this project is finished, she plans to return to painting. Digital photography is making the traditional kind too hard.

"The chemicals aren't what they used to be and getting paper is impossible. Luminos went out of business, and I got the last box of mural-size paper. And any more, I'm painting so much of the print, sometimes adding things that aren't even in the picture, I figured I ought to try just painting."

Larson's work for the public art program will not be on view until early 2006, but she is represented locally by Clayton Galleries, 4105 S MacDill Ave., Tampa, and has a one-person exhibition at the Polk Museum, 800 E Palmetto St., Lakeland, through Oct. 9. ALSO, an exhibit by Tampa's 2004 photographer laureate, Suzanne Camp Crosby, runs at the Tampa Museum of Art through Sept. 25.

- Lennie Bennett can be reached at 727 893-8293 or lennie@sptimes.com

[Last modified August 4, 2005, 12:45:03]