Heino Heimann

The photographer utilizes a room-sized Camera-Obscura with a fixed lens to make unique direct-positive prints.
One hundred and eighty years ago William Henry Fox Talbot published “The Pencil of Nature,” a book describing his miraculous discovery of “photogenic drawings” as the action of light leaving behind a direct image of what it meets on photo sensitive paper. Since then photography has lost its novelty and innocence. Kodak marketed the first camera to the public in 1888, today the iPhone serves as a ubiquitous image maker for both amateurs and the tech savvy. Photography as pure light drawing is almost extinct, except for the work of Heino Heimann. His photographs are as unique as handmade paintings.
Heino Heimann has directly linked to the forgotten origins of photography with his specially designed camera. His ingenious “chrome camera" combines the ancient photogram process with the Camera-Obscura and uses Ilfochrome photo papers, whose velvety depth, color brilliance, and light sensitivity are unprecedented, to create rich, original images. The images are exposed directly without film. The housing of the chrome camera is an incredible 2.5 x 2.5 x 6 meters. Flowers, plants, even people can fit in it comfortably. Light passes through a lens in the large room, focuses on the subject, and falls onto the photo paper. The resulting images have no film grain or pixels and are unbelievably smooth and clear.
Heimann’s photographs are the most direct method of illustration. The one-of-a-kind large images redefine photographic illusion. Simple and authentically composed, they have a presence and intensity, which one can hardly resist. The images literally preserve part of the subject itself.