During art school Bethany started creating diorama’s her objective was to show a realistic and imaginary world.With an ordinary camera the images remained too distant so Bethany resorted to a pinhole camera where she felt she was able to capture the feelings more easily.
Her inspiration comes from objects she finds or materials that appeal to her.She uses candle wax to build an ice palace and colored candy for a colorful dollhouse, while thousands of sugar cubes are used to construct the King Frogís castle. She taught herself the skills to construct a church-like building, which she then covered with meat appearing as stained glass.
Being a pinhole photographer Bethany is view of the world is quite distorted. Her everyday surroundings are looked at with a pinhole eye. Sugar cubes can be used to build a sugar palace, Meat looks like marble, vegetables form a jungle and chicken-feet are tree-trunks.
This is a excellent example of De Forest's work relating to my above description. This image directly shows Bethany's love for crossing reality with aspects of her imagination, for example the reality part of this photograph is of course the sunset and the imagination aspects are the toy cars neatly parked to resemble some sort of co-ordinated traffic.
The colours in this photograph are very vivid and strong this sort of colour composition would of have to have come by either using lomography film or later manipulation. This photograph was set in the Stonehenge as its iconic shape sticks out from the background. Although the cars in this piece are toy cars they don't appear to be at first especially if the composition wasn't particularly big.
This is another picture from Bethany's collection. This picture features frogs holding hands around a crystal bowl. This image is a lot more imaginary then made to be realistic aspects that convey this is the toy frogs, and the mosaic sweet made flooring. Inside the crystal ball is a starfish this could be to respond it with the theme of underwater creatures. The crystal ball might actually be the only element to this piece which is actually real. The colour in this piece is more randomized and explorative when compared to the previous structured high contrast piece.
I like Bethany's use of old techniques with new approaches however I do feel that some of the pieces she produces are very much cheesy and childlike in the sense that it becomes unskilful and uninteresting. Her style works best more subtly like in the first picture whereby the only imaginary aspect is the toy cars and not the whole composition. Another Photographer that does this is Justin Quinell, Justin is a UK pinhole photographer and he takes a rather different approach to Bethany. He particularly loves pinhole photography because of the excitement of not knowing how the image is going to turn out he compares it to life and says "if you knew what was going to happen tomorrow you might as well top yourself". Justin has experimented with a range of different objects to make his pinhole cameras from small ones to do the mouthpiece pinholes to large wheelie bin cameras to take pictures of whole scenery.
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