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Jan Kapoor has been involved in fine art photography for many years, her primary interests being landscape, natural abstraction and still life. She has been drawn to specialize in pinhole imagery for the past several years, using her collection of handmade cameras in various medium to large formats. She finds that pinhole is most expressive of the imperceptible passage of time, making visible that which is invisible to the ordinary eye, and of the mystery of non-human life which surrounds us.

Kapoor prints extensively in alternative processes including cyanotype and platinum/ palladium. Digital technology has become another important creative tool in her work.

Kapoor exhibits her work extensively: locally, nationally and internationally. Her work is in private collections throughout the world, and is also in several private and corporate collections in the United States. She has published several books of her work, including The Intertidal World; Camera Obscura;  Japan: A Visual Journal; and Ossabaw Island.

Another important aspect of my photography, expressed in series such as Circles of Return and the Coastal Georgia images,  is the exploration of the southern landscape, which is far from being pristine virginal wilderness. Hunting ground and home to generations of Native Americans, Africans and Europeans, it is a palimpsest containing many layers of meaning, of time and traditions. Trails developed along animal tracks. Roads evolved from old trails. In the woods, crumbling walls merge with the earth, hidden in lush vegetation. The land has been surveyed, mapped, parceled out and named, over and over again. Much has been forgotten, much is fading from view and from memory, much has been transformed; yet to the sensitive observer, the southern land is a speaking presence and living witness of the past.

The Ex Libris series is a group of autobiographical images, featuring books and other objects related to themes and ideas central to the artist’s inner life, made with a handmade 5x7 pinhole camera. The images are made utilizing platinum, palladium, cyanotype and Van Dyke Brown printing processes, alone and in combination, and are superimposed on scanned prints from old book covers and pages relevant to the individual image.

Dreamtime is a series of still life images, made with a 3-pinhole camera, which imaginatively blend disparate and/or associated elements to suggest a dreamlike story or idea. The exhibition prints are warmtone archival inkjet, mounted on stretched canvas.

The Ritual series was inspired by the haunting beauty and spirituality of the poetry of Jelaluddin Rumi, who was a scholar, teacher and mystical poet of 13th century Turkey. Upon reading some of his poems which express the mystery of this form of meditation, it occurred to me to do a series of self-portraits inspired by my response to Rumi's extraordinary verbal images. The photographs were made with a 4x5 pinhole camera; lighting was one photoflood; exposures were upwards of 2 to 3 minutes. The prints are VanDyke Brown on Cranes Platinotype paper. For the handmade artist book, the texts were printed on acetate and superimposed on brushed flame-shaped areas of cyanotype.  I assembled the images and text into an accordion-fold book with hard cloth-wrapped covers. The exhibition images are warmtone archival inkjet prints.

I make extensive use of alternative printing processes such as platinum, palladium, vandyke brown  and cyanotype; in addition, computer technology has become another, and very expressive, creative tool in my work.  Pinhole cameras enhance the timeless, dreamlike quality of many of my images, and multiple exposures in-camera express my sense of the complexity of what I photograph, my sense of the mystical in the ordinary, the silent mystery which permeates the visible world.