Cheryl Childress's solo show at Cactus Bra, San Antonio, closed last week. The work on the walls there was a few years old, though, so ...might be good caught up with Childress to see what she's up to these days.

One of the charms of the photographic medium is its ability to engage the visually imaginative with the perceptually real. When an image resembles our day-to-day reality, deviations from what we normally see are especially jarring. Playing with bits and pieces of our perceptual world, Saint Louis artist Cheryl Childress likes to shake things up a bit. Using pinhole photography and a Holga (inexpensive medium format camera with a lo-fi aesthetic), Childress makes images that examine sensory experience and imagination by creating unfamiliar visual worlds. Though her main body of work is shot on a professional grade medium-format camera, Childress began to employ these less precise techniques in 2008 with the series Phenomenological Find and …everything but the squeal. In these series, Childress uses subtle narratives and a rich visuality to explore the line that traditionally separates the real from the imaginary. 

For the series Phenomenological Find Childress used a Holga, taking an entire roll of film as a single frame. Sporadically advancing the camera, she produced a giant composite image from multiple exposures. Childress then pulled single frames out of the larger continuity to create the images—appropriately titled Excerpt I and Excerpt II The resulting photographs are subtly disorienting; twinned suns and pairs of identical trees compose a world so like, and yet so unlike, our own. Moreover, this process of excerpting evokes the way we normally experience the world—through snippets and memories that we, individually, piece together.

In the series …everything but the squeal, Childress extended her investigation by employing a pinhole camera. Instead of using a lens, pinhole cameras work by allowing an extremely restricted amount of light to make a direct image on film or light sensitive paper. The idea of making an image directly from the light of the world resonates with Childress, as it reinforces the connection between photography and the “real.” What is really appealing, however, is the fact that the image only arises from an extremely limited vantage point. Referencing Eric Renner’s book on pinhole photography, Childress cites a story about how Inuit tribes, for centuries, have made use of pinhole glasses for avoiding snow blindness. By restricting their view of the world to a tiny pinhole the Inuit people could walk in the snow again as the light was manageable. But, as Renner describes, “without protection, people saw strange things, saw too much, too wide.”* “The possibility that a different visual realm exists,” Childress said, “but is too strong or too dull for our eyes to see is fascinating to me.” 

By playing the photograph’s capacity to mimic what the human eye sees against its ability to twist or distort, Childress examines what it means to construct a visual world. Her exploration is a poignant one. And, it seems, has just as much to say about how we experience the world as it does about how we represent that experience.

*Eric Renner, Pinhole Photography: Rediscovering a Historic Technique, 2nd ed. (Boston: Focal Press, 2000), 13.

Allison Myers is pursuing an M.A. in art history at The University of Texas at Austin.