YOU ARE never more than 6 feet away from a rat. Of course, it’s an urban myth. But wait, fiddle with the r a t and in Dalston it starts to make sense: it can seem you are never more than 6 feet from a r t.
Today Sat 26 April 2014, for example, shoppers in Ridley Road Market were surprised to see a black-hooded man hunching over an object on a tripod as a friendly young woman hailed passers-by.
She was asking them to pose as part of the London Pinhole Festival. Antique-looking gentlemen, harassed market users and stylish hipsters duly stood still for the pinhole. They could later see the result in the Doomed Gallery, a mere cauliflower throw away.
The gallery and its rear garden were the venues for lectures, workshops and exhibitions as part of a collaboration with the London Alternative Photography Collective and the Double Negative Darkroom. They are leading up to Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day on Sunday 27 April 2014.
More activities that day, including at 1pm a flashmob doing simultaneous pinhole exposures.
How odd that in the era of the smartphone and its built-in camera, superior to those of only a decade or so ago, arty types – young ones at that – want to toy with the pinhole camera, the epitome of low-tech and a device that came into use a millennium ago.
David Altheer 260414
* Doomed Gallery, 65-67 Ridley Road, Dalston E8 2NP
* How to make a pinhole camera
* Emboldened underscored words in most cases indicate a hyperlink, a reader service rare among websites. If a link does not work, it is probably because the site to which the URL refers has not been maintained.