It's about time

Photo artist Robert Charles Mann captures the sun's passage across the sky as artist-in-residence at the Château Miraval. Graeme Greene finds out more

- Graeme Greene

Every six months, on the summer or winter solstice, Robert Charles Mann makes the 500-mile journey from his home in France's Loire Valley to Château Miraval, Brad Pitt's wine estate in the south of the country. 'It's a magnificent place,' says Mann. 'I've known Brad for some time. It's always a real pleasure to be there.'

Mann isn't there simply to guzzle rosé with his friend, but to check in on the pinhole cameras that he set up six months prior, removing the negatives and mounting new cameras. 'I never know what's coming,' he tells me, describing the anticipation of seeing what the cameras have produced each time. 'The waiting, the appreciation, the anxiousness of seeing the images, and whether I've failed or not, it's a big part of my life.'

Fifty of Mann's mysterious, dreamlike works from Château Miraval are collected together in his new book Solargraphs. A solargraph is a photographic image created with pinhole cameras using long exposures that capture the sun's movement across the sky for periods of time, in Mann's case six months.

Pinhole cameras are a low-tech idea - anyone could build one.

Mann makes many of his from coffee cans or round whisky bottle containers, though his pinholes (around 0.5mm) are produced using a laser for precise control over the aperture. But the simple camera process is combined with high-end, digital production techniques. 'When I harvest the cameras on the solstice, bring them back to the studio and take the paper out, it goes straight on the scanner,' Mann explains. 'I scan the paper at 400MB – big files – because sometimes I do prints up to 3 metres. It goes into Photoshop and I start working, maybe cropping... There's quite a lot of spotting and retouching to do. Often, there's water damage in the camera, which I leave, but I take out some of the dust or other stuff'.