About Maria G. Essig

“No place is boring, if you've had a good night's sleep and have a pocket full of unexposed film.”  ~Robert Adams, Darkroom & Creative Camera Techniques, May 1995

Intensely observant as a child, my interest in photography arose initially from the desire to preserve the pictures I framed in my mind and their associated emotions. As I gained experience, I realized that my photos could reveal a truth by portraying reality or distorting reality. This appealed to my sense of irony—the photographs that “worked” for me contained both a surficial beauty and a deeper, sometimes dark, meaning beneath.  A good photograph moves me emotionally, answers a question, satisfies an urge, scratches an itch, and appears attractive even if the subject matter is not.

At university, I studied chemistry.  My scientific temperament often conspires to focus my attention only on the technical details of photography.  To counteract this, I have turned to the simplicity and unpredictability of the pinhole camera. Released from the need to consider aspects such as lens choice and aperture, my creativity can assume precedence. Pinhole photography maintains the earliest traditions of capturing images on film—while modern technology allows progression of the art form by employing computers and scanners and ink-jet printers. I have melded the traditional with the modern by scanning the pinhole images and printing them on interesting papers or alternative materials, such as silk fabric, using an ink-jet printer. 

As a photographer I am a loner, skulking at odd hours in remarkable locations. I enjoy capturing images that present a calm belied by frenzied activity under the surface or just around the corner. An ironic beauty exists in these photographs: a serene train station retired after years of frenzied activity; an enchanting river ecosystem threatened by another subdivision; angry divisiveness behind the image of a flag in a military cemetery. My pictures give expression to a quiet activism—and my pinhole camera is the perfect partner for this, employing long exposure times that slow movement, creating a space for reflection.