Pinhole New York

“New York City like you’ve never seen it.”
— Opening Ceremony

Pinhole New York is a collection of photographs I’ve taken over the past thirty years in the New York metropolitan area. All photos were shot with one of several homemade cameras designed to hold 120 mm film — either a small box made by Peter Olpe, a Swiss photographer and educator, or a slightly less sturdy version modeled on it but made from cardboard and wrapped with black plastic and electrical tape.

The nature of pinhole photography, at least with the cameras and process I use, is that getting a good image is very much a crapshoot, a game of chance. With no viewfinder, a narrow focal length that distorts the subject, and long exposures, I have only a limited idea what an image is going to look like. On the basis of composition alone, to say nothing of poor exposures or light leaks, I invariably get a large number of uninteresting images from my shoots. But this element of chance is what I love about pinhole photography; I try to set conditions that will give me what I want in an image, but I can’t control the results. In the end each shot offers up surprising textures, lines, gestures, and spaces, all unseen at the moment of exposure but revealed in the crapshoot — and magic — of pinhole photography.

Stefan Killen
Brooklyn, 2020

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Scroll down for News, Bio, Exhibits, Publications, Media, Teaching, and Sales.

Bio

Stefan Killen (born 1964, Zurich, Switzerland) has been taking pinhole photographs of the New York metropolitan area since moving there in 1991. His work has been exhibited at the Alan Klotz Gallery and the Soho Photo Gallery, in shows juried by Larry Gagosian, Brian Paul Clamp, and Eric Renner among others, and is in private collections around the world. His photos were included in the award-winning book Out of Focus: Pinhole Cameras and Pinhole Photographs (Niggli, 2012), Blur magazine, Pinhole Journal, and United Airlines’ in-flight magazine Hemispheres. His photos have been featured on Lomography.com, OpeningCeremony.us, and Don’tTakePictures.com, as well as on the sets of such tv shows as Girls, The Following, American Odyssey, Power, Royal Pains, Creed, and Billions. 

Stefan is currently working on several books of his pinhole photography, including an interdisciplinary meditation on Walt Whitman’s poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”. In 2019, in celebration of Whitman’s bicentennial, he developed “Happy Birthday, Walt Whitman,” a national public reading of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” that introduced participants to Whitman and his poem, a sweeping meditation on time, our interconnectedness, and the transcendent power of art. Partners in the project included The Walt Whitman Project, The Walt Whitman Initiative, The Brooklyn Public Library, the Brooklyn Historical Society, Brooklyn Poets, The Academy of American Poets, and The Evergreen State College.

In 2017 Stefan collaborated with The Brooklyn Academy of Music on a series of pinhole portraits of the creatives of Crossing, an opera by Matthew Aucoin based on Walt Whitman’s Civil War writings that BAM produced.

Stefan grew up in Zurich, Switzerland and studied drawing and painting at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA. He lives with his family in Brooklyn where, in addition to his photography work, he runs Red+Company, a graphic design studio.

Exhibits

Publications

Walt Whitman’s Words: Inspiring Artists Today
November 2019
The catalog for “Walt Whitman's Words: Inspiring Artists Today”, an exhibit at the Center for Book Arts that included a group of my photos, was a winner in the 2019 AIGA 50 Books/50 Covers competition. Both the exhibit and the catalog were curated by Deirdre Lawrence, former Principal Librarian at the Brooklyn Museum.

Blur Magazine
Issue 55, June/July 2017
The Crotatian photography magazine Blur published a series of twelve of my pinhole portraits in the summer, 2017 issue of their journal.

The ƒ/D Book of Pinhole
2017
One of my photos is included in this book of pinhole photography that began with a worldwide call for entry. The book’s producers received an overwhelming response from around the globe and selected 99 images to publish in this book celebrating pinhole photography.

Pinhole Around the World  
2014
Four of my pinhole photos are included in this online survey of pinhole photography from around the world. Published by Fabricio Medina Villao the collection includes work by 37 photographers from 19 countries. More.

Public Illumination Magazine
#58, 2014
One of my pinhole photos (Wall Street Bull) was included in the Fortune edition of Public Illumination Magazine, published non-occasionally for over 35 years by Zagreus Bowery and his ace staff Miss Davenport and Mister Cologne. Past issues explore such important issues of the day as Water Sports, Excess, Hair, Enemies, Organs, and Bullshit.

Pinhole Cameras and Pinhole Photographs
2012
Six of my photographs are included in this beautiful book by the Swiss educator and artist Peter Olpe. The 432 page heavily illustrated book, published in Switzerland by Niggli Verlag, is a document of Olpe’s work with pinhole cameras and pinhole photography at the Basel School of Design in Basel, Switzerland. The book won a “Silver” prize at the esteemed German Photo Book Awards.

United Hemispheres
2009
I write in my blog about how I was commissioned by United Airlines to photograph a story for their in-flight magazine United Hemispheres. “Finders Keepers: The Hunt for Buried Treasure in New York Harbor” documents a search for sunken Guggenheim treasure in the New York Harbor. The article won a 45th Annual Print Award for photography from the Society of Publications Designers.

Positive Focus
2004
My photo “Jade” received an “Honorable Mention” in a contest by Positive Focus, a nonprofit center for emerging artists out of Brooklyn, and was included in their quarterly publication.

Pinhole Journal
2002
Contemporary Images 11 Volume 18 #3, December, 2002
Four of my photos of New York City bridges are included in this journal of pinhole photography, published by Eric Renner, the author of Pinhole Photography, From Historic Technique to Digital Application.

Blurb Books
I’m currently working on several books of pinhole photography, including an interdisciplinary meditation on Walt Whitman’s poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”. In 2019, in celebration of Whitman’s bicentennial, I developed “Happy Birthday, Walt Whitman,” a national public reading of the poem that offered participants an introduction to Whitman and his sweeping meditation on time, our interconnectedness, and the transcendent power of art. Partners and participants in the project include The Walt Whitman Project, The Walt Whitman Initiative, The Brooklyn Public Library, the Brooklyn Historical Society, Brooklyn Poets, The Academy of American Poets, and The Missoula Public Library.

Media

My work has been picked up by numerous online culture blogs — including Lomography, Opening Ceremony, Dossier Journal, Get Addicted To, and Subtraction.

YouTube
On April 13, 2021 Whitman scholar Karen Karbiener, poet Howard Nelson, and I read Whitman’s poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” screened 80 of my pinhole photos of New York City ferries, and discussed Whitman’s sweeping meditation on time, our interconnectedness, and the transcendent power of art. Link

Brooklyn Academy of Music
In 2017 I collaborated with The Brooklyn Academy of Music on a series of pinhole portraits of the creatives of Crossing, an opera by Matthew Aucoin based on Whitman’s Civil War writings. The photos were subsequently published on BAM’s blog to help promote the opera. Link

OFF//FOTO
My photo of Jane’s Carousel was used as the backdrop for a 2016 TV news piece on The Art of Pinhole Photography, an exhibition at the OFF//FOTO exhibit in Heidelberg, Germany that a series of my photos were in.

DontTakePictures.com
May 21, 2014My photo Jane’s Carousel was included in an online exhibition of Pinhole Photography produced by Don't Take Pictures. 49 photographers working with pinhole cameras were selected for the final exhibit. Visit the gallery to view the entire exhibition.

Crossing Dumbo 
The talented folks at Blue Barn Pictures interviewed me in 2012 as part of their series “Crossing Dumbo,” a collection of video portraits of Dumbo, Brooklyn artists. Link

Interview with Rob Hewitt
A video interview with Rob Hewitt, Creative Director at Ink when they hired me to photograph “Finders Keepers: The Hunt for Buried Treasure in New York Harbor” for United Airlines’ in-flight magazine Hemispheres. Rob discusses the process of working with me for this commercial project and mythical story of lost Guggenheim silver. Video interview by James Labounty. Link

Galantvision on Blip TV
Gregory Galant interviewed me during the 2008 Art Under the Bridge Festival (later the Dumbo Arts Festival and currently Dumbo Open Studios). At the time Greg was the CEO of Sawhorse Media, as well as the host and executive producer of Venture Voice, a radio show distributed as a podcast that profiled entrepreneurs and venture capitalists.

Teaching

Center for Book Arts
I was invited to participate in a panel discussion on Whitman and Photography at the Center for Book Arts in New York City, along with artists Marianne Dages and Daphne Fitzpatrick. Curated by Deirdre Lawrence.

The Evergreen State College
As part of The Evergreen State College’s 2019 Return to Evergreen alumni weekend I gave a presentation on my Walt Whitman work, including photographs of New York City Ferries.

IDEO Design Studio
As part of their weekly tea time creative presentation I gave a presentation to a group of designers at the New York office of the a global company IDEO.

Photoville
In 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016 I collaborated with photographers Alexis Lambrou, Scott Lapham, and Kisha Bari at the annual Photoville photo festival to teach workshops on the low-fi technology and aesthetics of pinhole photography.

Blue School
I gave an introductory presentation on pinhole photography to a group of 5th grade students at the esteemed Blue School in lower Manhattan. The class had already turned their entire classroom into a camera obscura and photographed the Brooklyn Bridge, right outside their window.

Princeton Photography Club
In 1993 I gave a presentation on the fundamentals of pinhole photography to the Princeton Photography Club.

Sales, Licensing, and Commercial Projects

Sales
I sell archival, editioned silver and digital lightjet prints of my photos. Photographs are also available for editorial or commercial use. Please contact me for prices and licensing or other commercial requests.

Licensing
My photographs have been licensed for use on the sets of numerous tv and movie sets, including Girls, The Following, American Odyssey, Power, Royal Pains, Creed, and Billions.

Permanent Collections
Located in the New York EDITION, Michelin-starred The Clocktower as well as at the IDEO Design Studio.

Commercial Projects
Musicians Andy Marino, Julia Haltigan, and Carol Lipnik commissioned me to photograph them for their CD covers. In 2009 United Airlines commissioned me to photograph a story for their in-flight magazine Hemispheres.