An exhibition of new pinhole photography by Jan Dunning and Kathryn Faulkner at Gallery Iota, Royal Esplanade, Ramsgate, Kent CT11 0EY from 14^th – 28^th September 2003.

The term Magical Realism was coined in 1925 to describe a style of painting which “…(occupied) a position between surrealism and photo realism… whereby the subject is rendered with a photographic naturalism, but where the flat tones, ambiguous perspectives and strange juxtapositions suggest an imagined or dreamed reality.”  The untrustworthy tableaux of artists such as Chagall, De Chirico and Magritte were the response to the uneasy times in which they lived.  By combining the banal and familiar with the fantastic and implausible they made work which was unsettling, but offered a simultaneous and exhilarating sense of escape. 

My new work for Magically Real took a more speculative approach and I experimented with chance encounters between light and time.  I am particularly interested in the revelations that serendipity can allow and many of these photographs resulted from ‘happy accidents’ and the pinhole camera’s unique way of seeing the world.  They show something that I couldn’t see at the time, something that is only possible to see through slow photography and no lens; an unseen magical world of sunlight and shadow.