FOCAL HERO

A MODERN TAKE ON THE CAMERA OBSCURA, THIS IS ONE PHOTO BOOTH SURE TO TURN YOUR VIEW OF THE WORLD ON ITS HEAD.

Give that we constantly try to create new ways to view the world, it is astonishing that we have – more or less – come to ignore two historic image media: the panorama and the camera obscura. Not so on the Greek island of Aegina, on the site of a Second World War gun emplacement, where the Aegina Academy, a forum for art and science, has commissioned a hybrid of the two from a Viennese duo, architect Franz Berzl and artist and film-maker Gustav Deutsch.

Ancestor of the photographic camera, camera obscura translates from the latin as ”dark chamber“. The earliest versions consisted of small, darkened rooms with light admitted through a single tiny hole. The result was an inverted image cast on the opposite wall. For centuries the technique was used for viewing solar eclipses and as a drawing aid: the subject would be posed outside and the image was reflected onto paper for the artist to trace. Over time, smaler versions were built, the inside painted black and the image reflected by an angled mirror, so that it was right side up. The introduction of a light-sensitive plate created photography as we know it.

In Berzl and Deutsch´s version – a 40 sq m wooden-clad steel structure and part of the Academy´s “Light Image Reality“ project – light is introduced into the cylinder through 12 tiny openings and projected onto a semi-transparent screen parallel to the outside wall. The 12-part panoramic image is an altered (and altering) state. For anyone who would like one at home – the total cost was € 30.000,-.

text by:
Suzanne Trocmé
Wallpaper* / may 2004