|
|
|
Taken With Time/ reviewed by |
|
Any exhibition involving camera obscura is fascinating because it strips away our accumulated assumptions and familiarity with the photographic image. Although it takes a certain amount of knowledge on the part of the viewer, it helps take one back in time technologically. There is an immediate focus (no pun) on the essential image-making method that preceded the advent of paper processing and conventional photography. Before 1839 (and after), the device was used as an amusement and an artistic tool for helping to define space and perspective. One can’t view a painting by Vermeer now without imagining him messing with one of those contraptions, and it adds to his mystique somehow. Claimed from antiquity, the discovery of camera obscura is attributed to Aristotle who noticed an image of an eclipsed sun on the ground underneath a tree. It turns out that what Aristotle was seeing in all those little discs of shimmering light was actually a projected image of the sun made through tiny apertures in the leaves. Thus began the notion that man could produce pictures from light and that nature itself creates the physics involved. The human eye is a fine example and functions in the same way with the lens taking in light and reversing the image on the retina. Perhaps what makes images made by camera obscura so mysterious is that it implies photography is not an invention at all but a harnessing of a natural process. Although this particular show includes three artists whose work is relayed using photo paper, the use of a pin-hole camera is still primary. Viewing the work at the Print Center takes a fair bit of understanding of this process and we must remind ourselves we are not looking at ordinary photography but images made using long exposures and then, as if an afterthought, printed. The use of high-tech printing serves as a bridge back to this archaic pre-photographic methodology and serves also as a way to update it to our present day button pressing. Vera Lutter’s grand industrial scene taken at 30th Street Station is a great example of this. It seems to capture both a sense of past and a grim human-less present – any people in the scene were disappeared in the “endless” shutter speed. For all its elements of old world landscape, it conjures an air of science fiction as well as seeming to be nothing if not contemporary art. The image, captured via 105 minutes inside a massive 4 by 12 foot pinhole camera, is particularly beautiful. Shown in the negative, it is all the more spooky and needs to be viewed slowly over time. Ann Hamilton’s work is full of spiritual leanings and laments the passing of slower culture. She uses many key sites of historical significance in Philadelphia – the Free Library, the Rosenbach Museum and several churches – where “blurred” people are caught in the act of reading. All these works serve as documentation of various performances but the one at Carpenter’s Hall – where the readers are caught by a special-built Lazy Susan sort of camera obscura – stands out. Here folks are reading aloud from different passages of the Federal Constitution. This particular text adds another level giving this piece more of a connection of place, which comes even more alive if the viewer takes the time to listen to the recording of the readings while viewing the work. One easily imagines Jefferson or Franklin in debate. This topical element – reading and democracy – helps the work come across less as stills, and more as part of a subtle and complicated delivery of issues. Other pieces feature readings from the Bill of Rights, Poetry and the Beatitudes. Abelardo Morell’s piece was the most challenging
in the show, bringing up issues of painting vs. photography and art in
museums, but perhaps doesn't quite live up to the challenge. A camera
obscura is set in the wall of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and projects
a massive image of the exterior edifice. This appears inside the museum
on a wall featuring de Chirico’s classic 1913 painting, The
Soothsayer’s Recompense. This overlapping view is then captured
by separate cameras so that what we see on paper is twice removed. All together, the grouping of these three artists illustrates many sides of what we think we know about photography and its nexus with reality. Not only does it offer much insight into contemporary use of camera obscura; it can’t help but offset, momentarily, the disposable stream of instant imagery from cell phones and digital cameras that engulfs us. That really is something to think about over time. Many thanks are due to the Print Center for envisioning this project and the PEI for its spot-on funding. © 2006 James Rosenthal and InLiquid.com; image copyright © Ann Hamilton |
|
|||||||||||
