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Arts Visual Art

Obscure Inversions gets camera

obscura
7 months ago by Michelle Falk 2 Comments

Vancouver Hotel, 2013 // Colin Smith, courtesy of

Peter Robertson Gallery

Each photograph invites the viewer into a dreamlike space. You see an outdoor scene
projected into a hotel room, but the photographs all look surreal: the outdoor scene is upside
down, folding over the walls and the furniture.

I think I like that the most, watching somebody standing there and slowly tilting their head
trying to view the other image on top, says Colin Smith, the artist-photographer behind
Obscure Inversions.

To look at Smiths photographs, you would never guess how the Calgary-based artistphotographer creates them. The effect is not produced with a double exposure, and there is no
digital manipulation involved. These are photographs taken of a process called camera
obscura.

Camera obscura is a scientic phenomenon: An image coming through a small hole creates
an inverted image on the other end, Smith explains. This image-making technology was rst
used in China in about 400 BCE, and the rst cameras also used this effect.

For Obscure Inversions, Smiths produced a series of camera obscuras inside hotel rooms
across Western Canada, including one at the Hotel Macdonald here in Edmonton. The series
looks at peoples interaction with the space around them, exploring how the world reclaims
places and time.

To create the images, Smith covers the windows with black plastic to darken the entire room,
then he cuts a small hole in the plastic and places a lens over it. The lens enhances the colour
and crispness of the image, and the light coming through the small hole in the plastic casts an
inverted projection of the scene outside into the room.

Smith brings his 45 Toyo lm camera (the old-fashioned ones with the accordion-looking
mid-section) inside the room to capture the image. Its just like putting a camera inside a
camera, Smith says.
He then sits in the darkened room with an exposure time of two to six hours to, hopefully,
get one picture. The limited light in the room and faintness of the camera obscura require this
long exposure time. Smith estimates about a 25-percent success rate for his work because the
photographs require optimal sunlighteven 20 minutes of clouds can ruin them.
In the digital age, when we can instantly snap pics on our phones, the concept of waiting an
entire day to (maybe) capture one photograph is almost incomprehensible. But Smith
describes camera obscura as a reawakening for both his photography and his perspective on
life.
During that whole process [of my earlier photography career], it was just on-the-go shooting
hundreds of photographs a day, he says. Then I built a camera obscura just for fun, for my
daughter, and I fell in love with the process. I decided to try and photograph them. And it

became such a slow process; it takes me all day, and then weeks to plan and to get one image,
if Im lucky It just kind of slowed my whole perception down, and how I view the world
and how I view art. It became just such a meditative spiritual process and I just cant do
anything else. Everything just kind of slowed down for me. It made me fall in love with
photography again.

Until Sun, Mar 1

Works by Colin Smith
Art Gallery of Alberta

#analogue #Art Gallery of Alberta #camera obscura #Colin Smith #photography

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2 Comments

Hilary
December 18, 2014 at 8:04 pm

Great article!
Reply

Estelle
December 20, 2014 at 5:51 am

Well written and very interesting art- photography. It gave me a new perspective on things.
Reply

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