Give him a sewing needle, some photographic paper and a cardboard box, and Ian Turner will show you a contemporary take on an ancient art.

At their simplest, pinhole cameras can be made from oatmeal containers, candy tins or hat boxes.

At the extreme end of the spectrum, pinhole cameras have been fashioned from washing machines, station wagons and an entire room at the Wyndham Montreal Hotel in Quebec. A man in the United Kingdom once turned the inside of his mouth into a pinhole camera.

The lensless photography medium, which evolved from basic optical principles first described in texts from the fifth century B.C. and applied to light-sensitive papers in the mid-1800s, is not much more than a lightproof container with a tiny hole at one end, and film or photographic paper at the other.

Light passes through the hole; an image is produced inside the “camera.”

Simple. Efficient. And according to photographer Ian Turner, absolutely wonderful.

“There’s such a sense of adventure about it,” Turner said. “It’s what used to get me excited like when I was a kid. No matter how many times I read the physics of it, it never ceases to astonish me. There’s nothing there. It’s just a hole.”

Not just any hole, though. The diminutive poke with a #10 sewing needle produces images with incredible, even ridiculous, depth-of-field. The area of focus in pinhole cameras generally ranges from mere inches to infinity — the f-stop value of the hotel room camera in Quebec was rated at f/720. Modern-day cameras generally don’t get much better than f/22.

And the dreamy, ethereal quality of the final images has inspired photographers and artists around the globe to put down their auto-everything cameras and return to the centuries-old basics.

Turner, a Manchester, England transplant who began making photographs with an old folding Agfa camera his uncle gave him at age eight, shied away from a lucrative career in commercial photography after losing sight of what he’d earned his masters degree in — art.

He’d done work with a number of magazines, including British Vogue, but wasn’t happy with the direction his work was heading.

“All the time I spent as a commercial photographer, I curtailed my artistic interests,” Turner said. “When I finally quit, I’d lost all interest in photography. The pinhole camera brought that interest back.”

He describes a weathered henhouse, surrounded by tall grass. It sounds simple enough, and to Turner’s naked eye, it was.

But when he printed the image taken with a pinhole camera, it was anything but ordinary – wind spirals circulated the weeds around the structure; invisible elements had been rendered apparent.

“It’s the things I didn’t know were there, those little accidents that I find wonderful,” he said. “I like to be astonished by what I look at.

“Take the Puget Sound. It’s not water anymore. It’s silk, or mist, or something other. It gets away from consensual reality without really trying.”

Turner has been using and constructing pinhole cameras off and on for more than 10 years. He has seen the rise of autofocus and digital cameras, and the changing of the guard from chemical to electronic darkrooms. But the pinhole aesthetic entrances him still.

“Even with the proliferation of fabulous cameras to reproduce images, you rarely see anything really new,” Turner said. “This is very meditative, it allows people to rediscover photography.”

W ith the pinhole camera, visual possibilities are broken down into specific shapes and blocks of tone. The image is viewed in a broad sense, and then reduced to it meaningful qualities, personal to the photographer alone.

There are, however, disciplines that do not lend themselves well to the meditative process – action photography, for example.

Pinhole cameras are one-shot wonders. After the shutter is opened and closed — with exposure times ranging from tenths of a second to hours — the entire camera goes back to the darkroom for film processing and reloading.

But pinhole cameras are capable of capturing images that would be nearly impossible with normal photographic equipment.

Turner displays a self-modified birdhouse, purchased at the local hardware store for less than $10. The six-sided structure has five pinhole apertures, and produces a quintet of exposures that flow seamlessly together on a single sheet of film — affording a 300-degree field of view.

“Most people really aren’t aware of pinhole photography,” Turner said. “The ones I’ve spoken to have been fascinated that you can make a photograph without hundreds of dollars of equipment.”

Turner hasn’t abandoned all of his store-bought gear; he’s still got an old medium-format roll-film camera, and an 8×10 view camera that he couldn’t bear to part with – a conversation-inspiring giant “where you’ve got your head under this black cloth, attached to a sort of Victorian-looking thing,” he said.

But it is the pinhole cameras he returns to time and time again.

He proudly pulls out a vertical three-holed wooden camera, a cardboard box covered with Cezanne imagery and black tape for a shutter, and a modified Soviet-era medium-format camera.

The lens on the Lubitel 166 has been removed and replaced with a zone plate — a series of clear and dark concentric rings with very specific diameters that produce a dreamy glow and halo effect between light and shadow.

“I actually improved this camera by doing this,” Turner said. “The photographs from these things are incredibly beautiful.”

The Russian contraption is the only one that remotely resembles a camera by any modern definition – a fact in which Turner delights.

“There’s just something subversive about being able to make your own camera,” he said.

“But, the absolute best part is when you do something really nice, and someone asks ‘Oooh, what kind of camera did

you use?’”