Objective? Immortalize with these "bidon-rooms" the most beautiful places in the city, showing their beauty but also, and above all, the importance of keeping them clean every day and fighting the pollution that afflicts them.
Don't store avocado like this: it's dangerous
Take a group of enterprising and rather creative men, a classic garbage can suitably transformed into a giant pinhole camera and the importance of fighting pollution: this is how the Trashcam project was born, created in Hamburg by Christoph Blaschke, Mirko Derpmann, in collaboration with the Scholz & Friends Berlin and Hamburg's garbage collection. Objective? Immortalize the most beautiful places in the city with these "bidon-rooms", showing its beauties but also, and above all, thethe importance of keeping them clean every day and to fight the pollution that afflicts them.
Thus, by mixing technique, wisdom and art, after converting bins into giant pinhole cameras, some beautiful shots which really offer an alternative point of view. The method is quite simple: practicing a small hole on one side of the box, the image is projected onto a giant 106 × 80 cm sheet of photographic paper suspended inside. Each shot, in optimal exposure conditions, can take up to 1 hour of exposure to capture the image, which is then developed in the special laboratory of photographer Matthias Hewing.
But stenoscopia, a photographic process that exploits the principle of the dark room for the reproduction of images, can be achieved using any container capable of retaining light, such as coffee cans. To build it, the greatest attention must be given to the creation of the hole, which must be thin and with a reduced diameter. “A method often used is to use a thin aluminum sheet similar to that used in cans, squared with a side of about 3 cm and made thin in the central area through the action of sandpaper. Reducing the thickness of the foil decreases the vignetting, due to the shadows produced by the edges of the hole, ”explains Wikipedia.
In short, a lot of ingenuity, creative recycling, extremely low cost of the tools, as well as excellent and original results. This is the recipe for Trashcam project, when a garbage can becomes sinstrument of the most beautiful photographic art and the fight against pollution of cities.
Roberta Ragni
