Back Members' Room
12/1/2013 - 9/2/2013

By Lili Carr and Elliot Rogosin

On 22 October 2011 an inhabitable thing, at once a small room and large camera on wheels, tracked the day in Bedford Square from morning to evening to night.

Exposing the large format photosensitive paper concealed there, beneath a trapdoor in the floor, 8 hours and 200 degrees was traced over 15 by 1.3 metres.

The very first camerae obscurae were pinhole cameras (a hole in a completely light-sealed room) built during antiquity. Just like the camera obscura in the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, we used a lens to allow for a brighter, sharp, projection: the scene was reflected in a mirror, and then projected onto a white reflective surface – the floor.

Many artists from the Renaissance onwards used a camera obscura to trace a scene quickly and accurately. Two artists famous for their attention to detail, Vermeer, the seventeenth-century Dutch painter, and Canaletto, known for his portrayal of eighteenth-century Venice, must have used this device to sketch scenes directly onto their canvasses.

We used the camera obscura to take a permanent photograph, a panorama, developed as a continuous piece a little over a year later.

This exhibition displays the result.

Exhibition photos by Sue Bar