
The Big Picture
An aging building becomes a giant pinhole device in this short film, as an artist works to convert its interior into what he calls possibly the world's largest disposable camera. Director Nigel Berringer's camera stays close to the process: blacking out windows, cutting the aperture, waiting for light to bend through the darkened rooms and burn an image onto whatever surface catches it inside. The film treats the building itself as both subject and instrument, watching the artist's hands-on work of turning architecture into optics while the city outside keeps changing around the structure. There is little narration or interview here; the emphasis falls on the physical transformation, the tools and materials involved, and the odd category the finished object occupies, part sculpture, part functioning camera. Credited to artist Joel Nicholas Peterson, the project raises a plain question about what counts as art when the canvas is a condemned or aging building rather than a frame.