Dedee Shattuck Gallery showcasing pinhole photography

The Dedee Shattuck Gallery will present Camera Obscura: Pinhole Photography from Marc St. Pierre and Marian Roth in the month of April.

An artists’ reception will be held from 5 to 7 p.m. on Saturday, April 6. The exhibition will run through April 28.

Camera obscura (Latin for “dark chamber”) is the natural phenomenon of light piercing a small hole and falling on a darkened screen — creating an upside-down and backwards image of whatever scene that hole faces, a press release from the gallery states.

Recorded by 4th-century-BCE Chinese and ancient Greeks, this phenomenon is often considered only a historical footnote in the journey to the complexity and riches of modern photography.

“These two artists, however, continue to explore camera obscura, creating photographs that have the ethereal and painterly quality of something handmade, rather than the machine-made sharpness of realism we associate with photography,” the release states.

Building their own pinhole cameras, the artists show the enduring magic of capturing light with nothing more than photosensitive paper, a pinprick, and a dark chamber.

St. Pierre received his BFA from University Laval in Québec City, Canada and his MFA from Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville. He maintains a studio at Hatch St. Studios in New Bedford and is professor emeritus of fine arts in the College of Visual and Performing Arts at UMass Dartmouth.

He was the recipient of a one-year grant to study printmaking at Atelier 17 in Paris with Stanley William Hayter. He was also awarded an artist residency at St. Michael’s Printshop in Newfoundland, Canada. His work has been in several exhibitions including New England Impressions: The Art of Printmaking, juried prints at the Fitchburg Art Museum, which traveled to Kleve, West Germany.

Roth, born in Coney Island in 1944, moved to Provincetown in 1982 to fulfill a dream of living and making art in a community of creative people. She has never thought of leaving.

“Well-known in the world of photography for her innovative camera obscura work, Marian has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pollock-Krasner Fellowship and a Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council,” the release states.

She has been awarded with a lifetime achievement award for artistic excellence by the Provincetown Art Association and Museum

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