This work examines the architecture of agriculture in the eighteen towns which comprise Columbia County. Mr. Donahoe’s work is unique in that the cameras he uses are pinhole cameras made from the humblest of materials: tin cans and film boxes and ‘lenses’ that are holes punched in copper sheets – the ‘camera obscura’ of early photography. Yet the circular images he creates have great sophistication despite the primitive technology. The distinctive look of these circular images and the technical simplicity of the equipment match the look and feel of the objects being depicted.

Since January he has been intensively photographing barns and silos throughout the county to document their architectural significance as they fall into disuse or demolition. He has concentrated on those that seem most imminent of collapse, of unique materials -fieldstone, shingle roofing, rusted metal etc., of unusual style, within historic districts or of great age or significance. In just the past few months some of the buildings he photographed have been demolished. Other barns have been rebuilt, their timbers and boards recycled as perhaps many times before, and readied for another century of use.

"The architecture of agriculture is a fragile heritage that is falling into decline. Even the distinctive presence of the towering silo as a definitive element of the farmscape is being replaced by bunker silos. The ‘modern’ barns of the post-WW II era are being replaced by prefabricated cloth and tubular steel structures. Ever the model of functionality, the barns and silos of the past have acquired a monumentality that may soon be lost to us."

Mr. Donahoe has been a photographer for more than thirty years. He has worked in fashion and commercial studios in Manhattan, has been a police photographer for the New York City Police Department, has used electron microscopes to photograph the ultrastructure of cells and his documentation of the working life of NYC’s cab drivers was published by New Amsterdam Books in 1991as The Night Line, a Memoir of Work. Twenty –five photographs from this work were requested by the Museum of the City of New York for its permanent collection. He has received two Special Opportunity Stipend awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, most recently in November to travel to France for an exhibition that featured his Hudson Valley pinhole camera landscapes.

Ten years ago he began using pinhole cameras exclusively as a reaction against the growing cult of digitized imagery. As a ‘wet darkroom’ printer he has achieved a color range and luminosity in his sepia and selenium toned gelatin silver black and white prints that are markedly different from ink based laser printed digitized photography. The long time exposures used to make his negatives show the contrast of the motion of trees, water and sky against the solidity of barns and silos. His work falls into the practice of what has come to be called photography’s antiquarian avant-garde: those who have embraced the discarded process of early photography (cyanotype, daguerreotype, collodion and albumen) and optical primitivism (pinhole and zone plate photography) and are re-inventing the history of photography.

PHOTOGRAPHIC EXHIBITION HISTORY

ONE PERSON EXHIBITIONS

Galerie Nataal
Arcachon, France

11/97 “The Internal/External Landscape:
Electron Micrographs and Pin Hole
Camera Landscapes”

Spencertown Academy
Spencertown, NY

10/77 “Sacred Space - Ritual Action”
Master’s Thesis Exhibition

Pratt Institute,
Brooklyn, NY

12/88 Museum of the City of New York acquires 25 prints from The Night Line portfolio for the permanent collection; seen as a unique work reflecting a working-class perspective on NYC at night. The photographs document my two years as a New York City cab driver showing the City at night from the physical and social perspective of a cab driver.

Present My work is represented in a number of private collections.