About the Film

This pinhole photography documentary film follows a project commissioned by Helix Arts, funded by the Co-op Foundation and YMCA, that brought young people from Evenwood together with the Evenwood History Group. Using handmade pinhole cameras, the group set out to re-photograph the village’s own archive images and see what had changed, and what hadn’t. It is one of the quieter films in my archive, but also one of the ones I think about most often.

Do You Recognise These Places?

The project began with a simple question, put to the group alongside a set of archival photographs of Evenwood: did they recognise these places? Many didn’t. Coal yards, terraces and village shops felt distant, even though the photographs were taken on the same streets the young people lived on every day. That gap between a familiar street and an unfamiliar photograph of it turned out to be exactly the right place to start.

Slowing Down with Pinhole Photography

Pinhole photography is a slow process, with exposures sometimes lasting up to a minute and images that emerge gradually with a soft, dreamlike quality, a world away from the instant feedback of a phone camera. That slowness turned out to matter as much as the images themselves, pushing the group to actually look at a place rather than simply point a camera at it. Choosing this particular technique for a pinhole photography documentary film about noticing a place properly felt like the right match of method and subject rather than a gimmick.

You understand where they came from, why they took those pictures, and how they actually took them.

A Deepening Connection

Youth workers and teachers involved in the project noticed how it helped reduce isolation and build confidence, giving the group a reason to talk to each other about something other than the everyday, a small but real shift in a village where that kind of casual connection cannot always be taken for granted. One young participant put it plainly.

At first I thought it would be boring and not my thing. But it’s actually been really good. I feel more part of my town now.

The moment the first prints developed brought its own kind of surprise.

When I first saw my image developing, I was like wow. You’d think it came off a phone, it looks mint.

A Trail Across Evenwood

The project ended with a geocache trail across the village, with the group’s finished prints placed into small boxes for local residents to find, respond to and leave their own reflections beside. With extra support from Northern Heartlands, the trail has kept growing since, drawing in more young people to add their own images and responses to the village’s story.

Filming Evenwood’s Hidden Treasures

I was invited to document the whole process rather than just the highlights, and what stayed with me wasn’t the pinhole images themselves so much as the slow shift in how the group talked about their own village over the weeks of filming. Buildings that had been background noise became points of curiosity, and stories that had slipped out of circulation locally were suddenly worth telling again. Making a pinhole photography documentary film about a process this unhurried meant matching that pace rather than rushing past it, letting the quiet moments in a darkroom or on a doorstep carry as much weight as anything said to camera directly. Some of the most telling footage from the whole project was never a finished print at all, just someone standing in a familiar street looking at it slightly differently than they had that morning.