TAKEN WITH TIME, a Camera Obscura Project in Philadelphia
With Ann Hamilton, Vera Lutter, and Abelardo Morell

September 7 – November 11, 2006
at the Print Center
1614 Latimer Street
Philadelphia, PA 19103
215-735-6090

The Print Center, a nonprofit gallery continuing its 91 year mission to support printmaking and photography, announces the opening of its Fall 2006 exhibition, TAKEN WITH TIME: A Camera Obscura Project. 

TAKEN WITH TIME brings together three internationally recognized contemporary artists in the field of photography who have taken a unique and innovative approach to reviving the magical camera obscura.  The camera obscura is a simple device for capturing an image.  It is a box, sometimes as big as a room, with a hole in one of its walls.  Light passing through the hole produces an inverted image on the opposite interior wall of the view outside. The light is very dim inside a camera obscura necessitating a long exposure time to capture the projection.  In TAKEN WITH TIME each of the three invited artists — Ann Hamilton (Columbus, OH), Vera Lutter (New York, NY) and Abelardo Morell (Boston, MA) — has devised his or her distinct method of executing the time-consuming exposures resulting in three images representing Philadelphia’s architectural, social and industrial histories.

Abelardo Morell converted Gallery 171 in the Modern and Contemporary wing of The Philadelphia Museum of Art into a giant camera obscura.  Through a small hole in one of the gallery’s clerestory windows, Morell projected the corner of the museum’s West Entrance onto Giorgio de Chirico’s painting The Soothsayer’s Recompense (1913) hung on the opposite gallery wall.  Morell captured the projected image of the museum with three 4x5 cameras, one filled with color film which was a first for Morell. This color image has revitalized Morell’s series for the camera obscura, which prior to his work with TAKEN WITH TIME was coming to a close.  Instead, this image has become the first of a new series of color camera obscura photographs.

Vera Lutter, with the help of The Print Center and Amtrak, has created a shipping - container sized camera obscura, which was placed on the northwest corner of the second floor of the Amtrak parking garage at 30th Street Station.  The site afforded a west view overlooking the rail yard, a rail bridge and Amtrak’s abandoned steam heating plant.  Lutter captured her image directly on photographic paper, not on negative film, making her photograph a one-of-a-kind. 

Ann Hamilton’s cameras are miniature in size compared to those of Abelardo Morell and Vera Lutter.  The artist had selected three different sites. The first captured visitors to Carpenter’s Hall, in Old City. The participants were invited to gather around a circa 1800’s round table for the duration of the exposure. The second was set in front of a congregation at a Philadelphia church to capture the congregation’s movement or lack there of during the mass, Shabbat or meeting. The third camera was placed in the center of a group meeting in a location specifically used for a gathering. 

Taken with Time is curated by Jacqueline van Rhyn, Curator of Prints and Photographs at The Print Center and is made possible by the Philadelphia Exhibition Initiative, a grant program funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts and administered by The University of the Arts, Philadelphia.