Ruth Thorne-Thomsen, a photographer who made witty and surreal tableaux that she captured with a pinhole camera — “environmental collages,” she called them — evoking and transfiguring the romantic travel photography of the 19th century, died on Oct. 27 at a hospice facility in Philadelphia. She was 82.
The cause was respiratory failure, Sarah Morthland, the director of her archive, said.
Ms. Thorne-Thomsen’s pinhole pictures, which were the size of postcards, were captivating and uncanny.
She used props and cutouts to create miniature landscapes, often set outdoors. For one image, she built a tiny pyramid on a beach and added silhouettes of palm trees. In another, a paper airplane that seems as big as the real thing “flies” over a photo of the Chicago skyline.
She sliced a photo she had taken of the Tower of Pisa, planted it in the sand and paired it with a photo of a hot-air balloon that appeared to be floating in the distance. For another piece, she juxtaposed an image of ancient statuary — an enormous head, set slightly askew — with the silhouette of a man in formal attire, suited and sporting a hat.
The photographic paper she used gave her work a blurred, vintage quality, like photos from a 19th-century album of someone’s Grand Tour — if the traveler had been smoking opium.
The collages intentionally recalled the photographs of Francis Frith and Maxime Du Camp, the pioneering Western photographers who traveled to Egypt, Palestine and Syria in the mid-19th century, documenting ancient monuments.
“Thorne-Thomsen reminds us that since photographs are never true documents,” Kelly Wise wrote in a review for The Boston Globe in 1983, “she might as well make them absurdly unreal.”
Ms. Thorne-Thomsen also took inspiration from Surrealists like Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp and especially the painter Giorgio de Chirico, who made his own singular juxtapositions of statues and architecture.
A pinhole camera is the simplest of technologies. Made from a box — Ms. Thorne-Thomsen favored 8-by-10-inch cardboard boxes — it has a tiny hole punched on one side that functions as an aperture. Some sort of film, like photoreactive paper, is affixed to the interior of the box on the opposite side. There is no viewfinder, so the photographer can’t control the resulting image beyond the setup.
Ms. Thorne-Thomsen loved the mystery of the process.
“I’ve always been fascinated with what you can’t see that you can capture photographically,” she said in a 2014 video interview for Schmidt-Dean Gallery in Cherry Hill, N.J. “I would always wind up with something I’d never seen before. That was the thrilling part.”
Denise Miller-Clark, who curated a show of Ms. Thorne-Thomsen’s work at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago in 1993, described her as “an archaeologist of the spirit.”
Ms. Thorne-Thomsen turned to photography in the early 1970s, after studying painting in college. At the time, many of her peers were influenced by Diane Arbus or the street photographer Garry Winogrand, as well as Joe Deal and others featured in the 1975 “New Topographics” exhibition at the George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y., who focused on the anomie and chilly beauty of the country’s urban and suburban landscapes.
“Ruth, however, pioneered a different path,” Ms. Morthland said in an interview. “Eschewing prevailing trends, she embraced the imprecise nature of a handmade pinhole camera to create small, soft-focus images of incongruous tableaux, at once romantic, provocative and incredibly witty.”
Ruth Tenney Thorne-Thomsen was born on May 13, 1943, in New York City, one of five children, and the only daughter, of Mary (Edwards) Thorne-Thomsen and Leif Thorne-Thomsen, a specialist in managed care for Kaiser Permanente.
The family lived in Berkeley, Calif., until Ruth was 12, when they moved to Lake Forest, Ill. After studying dance at Columbia College of Missouri, she spent a year dancing professionally with a company based in Northbrook, Ill. She earned a B.F.A. in painting at Southern Illinois University and then a B.F.A. in photography from Columbia College Chicago, followed by a master’s degree in the same subject from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, graduating in 1976.
After a year as a staff photographer for The Chicago Sun-Times, she returned to academia as a professor of photography, first at Columbia College Chicago and later at the University of Colorado Denver. While teaching at Columbia, she met Ray K. Metzker, the renowned experimental photographer, who became her romantic partner in the early 1980s and her husband in 2000.
Ms. Thorne-Thomsen’s pivot to photography was spurred by tragedy. In 1967, her younger brother Carl was killed while serving in the Army in Vietnam. Devastated, she gathered a few negatives she had of him and learned to print them, which, as she recalled in an artist’s statement, she did over and over again.
In the early 1970s, she spent a summer in Arctic Alaska and brought a camera along. “It was like acting out a fantasy,” she told The Chicago Tribune in 1993, “connecting with the exploratory photographers.”
She was in graduate school when a friend gave her a pinhole camera. With the encouragement of her grandmother and mother, both amateur photographers, she began to experiment, making dioramas in the sand at the family’s Santa Barbara, Calif., ranch.
“I knew immediately that this was it,” she said in 1993. “It was the blueprint, the matrix, for everything that followed.”
Later she ditched the pinhole camera for a more conventional one. She and Mr. Metzker frequently traveled on artists’ grants and lived in Italy for a time, and she would use her camera to, as she put it, “collect images.”
In one series, she printed 11-by-14 photographs of statues, put some music on, dimmed the lights and danced around, taking photos of the photos using a long exposure. The resulting work was hallucinatory, the images mostly obscured, visible only through trails and swirls of light.
Ms. Thorne-Thomsen’s photographs are in the permanent collections of museums including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, both in New York City, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
Mr. Metzker died in 2014. She is survived by three brothers, Leif, John and Roger.
“Ruth was a wonderfully serious artist, but not an ambitious one,” said Keith F. Davis, the founder and former senior curator of the photography department at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo. “She did the work for her own purposes, and on her own schedule.”
He added: “She was aware of the market, of the larger superstructure of the business, but her motivations were emphatically personal and internal. That gave a special quality to her work, making it richer and more important than most people have realized.”
An interviewer once noted that her work was filled with mystery. “Does that drive you?” he asked.
“I guess so,” she said, “because it’s all a mystery to me!”
Penelope Green is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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