The Camera Obscura, also known as a pinhole camera, has fascinated people for centuries. Once a scientific tool and a painter’s aid, it has found new life in art, education, and experimental photography. Today, you can either build your own or buy a ready-made model – but what should you consider before making a purchase? What Is […]
The camera obscura—literally “dark chamber”—is one of the oldest optical inventions in human history. Described during the Renaissance and later foundational to the earliest photographs, it still matters in the smartphone age. In fact, it’s more relevant than ever. Camera Obscura in Contemporary Art Artists value the medium’s slowness and serendipity. Weeks- or months-long pinhole exposures produce solargraphs that […]
Leonardo da Vinci was among the first to recognize the striking resemblance between the Camera Obscura and the human eye. Both rely on the same optical principle: light enters through a small opening into a dark chamber and forms an image on the opposite surface. At first glance, the two systems seem almost identical, yet the differences […]
The history of photography began with a simple experiment in 1816. French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépceplaced a sheet of paper coated with silver chloride at the back of his Camera Obscura – a “dark chamber” with a tiny hole projecting the outside world onto an inner surface. He pointed the camera out of his window in Saint-Loup-de-Varennes. After several days of exposure, […]
Przemek Zajfert is showing his Projekt The 7th Day at TEDx, Stuttgart 2014. The Seventh Day: Silver, Lavender, Asphalt, Sun and Time Why restraint makes you creative and free What happens when, instead of taking one thousand snapshots, you make just one image and expose it for days, weeks, or even months? The artist and […]
This “Framed Camera Obscura” is located in a doctor’s office in Stuttgart. It has been exposing one of the rooms for over 5 years. At the beginning of each year the negative is taken out by the participant and is sent to me. After the development and the reversal into the positive, the participant receives […]
The camera was attached to the gate of the silent house in Ameugny (Taize) for 7 days and accompanied the silence of the participants. The movement of the gate was the only external sign of communication with the non-silent world.
One question we are often asked is why our Camera Obscura photographs display so many different colors. A key reason lies in the photographic paper we use. Each type of paper has its own chemical composition and therefore reacts differently to light. In our project, we use hundreds of different papers – some of them more than […]
