Pinhole camera

As a kid I spent much of my time inventing props and images for my fantasy life. To fully imagine I wanted to make it live outside my skin via the play between my eyes and hands. I modelled my imaginings with plasticise and drew them with coloured pencils, I would look at things, people and places then shut my eyes to remember them like a camera; sea and river, trees, ships, boats, cars, aeroplanes, footballers, teeming insect life, animals and birds. Fantasizing before falling asleep I would call out to my father to verify crucial facts, which was faster, Spitfire or Hurricane, lion or tiger, or who scored the most goals or runs? This was in my Western Australian childhood living near the bush on the edge of an isolated tuberculosis sanatorium inland from Perth where Dad was Medical Superintendent. He was a specialist in tuberculosis and one of those who helped eradicate it as an epidemic disease.

Later we moved to Fremantle then Perth and when I was ten I made a pinhole camera out of a cardboard shoebox, pinhole at one end and painted white screen at the other because I wanted it to be like the ‘pictures’. I made little seats for the audience and a viewing window in the roof of my make believe cinema, sometimes I pointed the pinhole out of Dad’s car window and watched the upside down world pass by.

My home made camera strikes me now because it seems a stand-in for myself, of the theatre inside my skull and of who I became, an artist who worked in hospitals to earn a living in a way helpful to patients and later to train others to do likewise. Key to this was the artist Guy Grey-Smith who caught TB in a German POW camp during World War II and then as a patient in England was helped by Adrian Hill who originated the term ‘art therapy’ to describe his method of working with TB patients. Suffering a relapse after returning home to WA he met my father and became a family friend who introduced me to art therapy after I finished art school.

Arriving in Britain in the early 1960s I worked in psychiatric hospitals and became intrigued by the experiences of the patients I met. What goes on behind another’s face is hidden to others and often obscure for those whose face it is. A ‘complicated pancake’ the Irish writer Flann O’Brien wrote. Sometimes this inner self has to be ‘seen to be believed’. A camera became essential to store the art work of many years in art therapy studios which, if spread out flat, might literally cover acres of space. Some of these paintings, drawings and sculptures were as baffling as O’Brien’s pancakes.

I recalled my childhood device years ago in an art therapy workshop and made a drawing of it which is now lost. So my photographed drawing here is a drawing of a drawing and a memory of a memory.

John Henzell: I was born in 1938 in Manchester where my mother was from, my father was Australian. In 1941 my mother two older sisters and I moved to Western Australia followed later by my father who had served as a ship’s surgeon in the merchant navy. I received my schooling in WA followed by art college before going back to Britain in 1959 to work as an art therapist in the NHS. I returned to Australia in 2001 then again to Britain in 2017. Underlying all these years was a playing off of what I saw outside my skin against what I saw behind it, no mere abstract construct but a picture album that became myself which I sometimes try to describe to or search for in others.