Alt. featured artist series: Nick Dvoracek
Nick Dvoracek
Nick Dvoracek has been involved in Pinhole Photography since arranging a workshop with noted pinhole photographer Ruth Thorne-Thomsen while teaching photography at Knox College. After teaching summer middle school workshops at the turn of the century, he began exclusively working in pinhole, using cameras he designs and makes out of packaging cardboard. Since 2015 he has written the blog Pinholica.
A BIG thank you to our guest interviewer and blog writer, Miranda Dunlap, for all of here hard work and dedication to spotlighting our featured artists!
We are excited to be hosting our fourth gallery show, ALT. - A Photo Opp Gallery opening on October 16, 2026 at our Photo Opp studio space! See Nick’s work and the work of our three other featured artist on our gallery page.
Community Submissions are open through August 10, 2026!
Thank you to our Gallery Presenting Sponsor:
Q: What does the theme “ALT” mean to you personally or artistically?
A: The ways to make a photographic image vary greatly. “ALT” is just about anything outside of conventional lens-based silver gelatin printing or digitally created output. It gets into a lot of hair-splitting variations.
Q: What do you think is something that people often misunderstand about your work?
People's expectation of pinhole photography is usually based on a junior high school science class, where you got one sheet of paper and about half the class got something that you could recognize that was a photograph, and they were all smeared and blurry, and isn't that cool. That's what people think pinhole photography is.
Usually, they come in with this preconception of all this strange, psychedelic high contrast, smeary, blurry, magical, ghostly stuff. And then from me, they get a long grey-scale, formal geometric composition of a bricked-in window on the old Exclusive Company's door which they would never expect to be produced by a pinhole, so I don't know. I have no idea how people react to it.
Q: What role does risk, imperfection, or breaking convention play in your work?
A: I'm not thinking about it. I'm trying to take the best photograph possible. But it's always a little bit of a surprise when you see the negatives, especially based on the fact that pinhole exposures tend to be long, and that is often visually apparent in the picture. Sometimes fun things happen like movement making people's heads disappear. I'm not really out to do that, but all that stuff is fun when it occurs. I don't approach it and say, “I'm going to do this strange double exposure thing.” It just happens.
Q: What do you hope viewers feel, question, or notice when they experience your work?
A: Well, first of all, it's a photograph, whether it's “ALT” or not. You gotta like the photograph. My interests are very broad. Gallery owners say, in order to get their attention, you really have to have a unified body of work, and I couldn't do that if my life depended on it. I do everything from portraits, street, architectural, abstract, close-ups, you name it. I hope people take away some impression of how amazing it is that this homemade, ultimately simple process can produce good photographs.
Q: What advice would you give to someone considering submitting work to our ALT Gallery?
A: Juried shows are another thing that you could discuss for the end of eternity — it's a gamble. Every juror is different, and you never know what the jurors are thinking. I'm not exactly sure why I do it, but it completes the process to get it in front of an audience.
