Bruno Moyen is a French advertising photographer. After spending years running a studio and shooting for big companies and corporations in France, he has decided to settle down in New York.

He has been taking pinhole pictures for three years with his camera obscura in various locations but mainly in New York City. He has found in this medium the best tool for what he considers the art of photography: a process that should reveal a different point of view whatever the subject is, and what is always considered the artist's "self-portrait".

The pinhole camera " camera obscura " is a camera with neither lens nor viewfinder. It's a box holding a film plate, and pierced with a tiny hole on the opposite side of the film. A lens isn't needed to take a picture: the rays of light merely have to be focused on one point and a very tiny hole is sufficient. The process is well known since the ancient Greeks and even

Leonardo da Vinci built several, some huge. He was able this way to reproduce precisely, in drawing, the external reality. Compare viewing an eclipse using a cardboard box with a pinhole.

Photography consists of fixing the latent image on film. Of course, as the hole is very tiny, very little light comes through it and the exposures are several minutes long. The result of these long exposures is that only objects that don't move during this time are impressed on the film so the scenes are virtually devoid of live subjects.

The other unusual features of this medium are the very wide angle (without any optical alteration, of course); the diffraction of the front light; the vignetage (the center of the image is lighter than the borders); and the extreme depth of field (from few millimeters to infinity).

All these images are shot on 4 X 5 black and white Polaroid film with reusable negative. The print is thrown away, the negative is scanned, then levels are adjusted by computer and then prints are made on archival paper with special ink. These photographs tend to evoke the perspective of a child discovering a place: eyes up and still. There is a very "soft" feel to them, and they look somewhat like very early photographs. It has a lot to do with a time paradox: there's quite a long time in these pictures and yet they seem timeless ...