I return to the wall with a funky set of experiments titled "Stomata: Dr. Mahashe's Open Frames' 2026. My most rigorous but also most playful work yet.
Stomata: Dr. Mahashe’s Open Frames (2025) is a series of large-format (4 × 5 and 8 × 10) negatives. The images follow a prompt posed by George Mahashe during a phone call in April 2025. Over the course of the conversation, Dr. Mahashe wondered what might happen if the interior of a camera obscura were not treated as a void, and if the pathway to the aperture were understood not merely as a means to an end, but as a potential in itself.
Earlier that year, I had facilitated a pinhole camera–building workshop with a group of MFA students from the Department of Painting and
Sculpture at KNUST. The exercise—particularly in the way it laid bare the individual components of the camera and optical system—made me curious about what might occur when elements of this system are reconfigured, rearranged, or even substituted. This approach already aligned with my broader interest in reprogramming photography for alternative purposes. Dr. Mahashe’s prompt stayed with me.
The project, titled after him, consists primarily of two cameras: a control camera and an augmented camera, both of which were repeatedly built from scratch to identical dimensions. The two cameras were typically exposed to the same subject matter—primarily the materials, spaces, books, and people involved in the project—and developed simultaneously for comparison. We tested the effects of intervening in the conventional void of the camera with systems of mirrors, heat, and even plant gases, constructing and modifying different cameras to enable these experiments. We also explored the effects of using multiple pinholes.The images presented here are selected from a range of tests.
In the selection involving mirrors placed within the pathway between the aperture (pinhole) and the film plane—one of four interventions—we observed an extension of the original pinhole’s field of view. Facilitated by the mirrors, the camera was able to see above itself, to its extreme left and right, and even the ground beneath it, within an approximately 300- degree field of vision, depending on the angle of the interior mirrors and the areas of greatest light. Unlike conventional pinhole cameras, which admit light through a single aperture and record a one-to-one projection of the external world, the mirrored inner chamber creates multiple optical paths from a single pinhole. Each incoming ray may strike the film plane directly, or after one or many reflections, producing layered, displaced, or multiple projections of the same scene within a single exposure. The resulting negatives display a visual phenomenon resembling double or multiple exposure, yet arising from a single uninterrupted act of exposure. Through this multi-path convergence, direct and reflected rays meet on the same photosensitive plane. Additional, less easily explained effects appeared on some film sheets, including glowing forms. In certain tests—such as the collection of interior exposures—we devised methods for the cameras to photograph their own interiors. By partitioning a large-format 8 × 10 camera into two chambers, blocking the external aperture with a lens cap, and introducing a second aperture within the camera itself, we projected the interior of the first chamber onto the film plane. In this collection, the pinhole diameter that becomes subject matter is also the diameter of the second aperture dividing the camera. The degree of sharpness or blurriness in the resulting image directly correlates with this relationship, such that the inscribed pinhole diameters visible in the photographs simultaneously identify and perform the optical conditions of their own representation, revealing the very conditions of their appearance. This selection forms part of the larger body of work produced in response to the 59th Carnegie International
