Marja Pirilä: Camera obscura/ Kaarina, Tampere, FI, 2004

Completion year: 2004

Technique: pigment print

Size: 84x90 cm

Edition: 7+7+ 2AP

Keywords: Camera obscura, Marja Pirilä

This photograp is a part of my series CAMERA OBSCURA Interior/Exterior

Interior/Exterior is the most extensive and long-lasting project accomplished with the camera obscura method. So far I have photographed this series in Finland, Norway, Italy and France, and the work continues.
My idea in embarking on the Interior/Exterior project was a nocturnal inspiration: in a room converted into a camera obscura I could capture an image of a person and at the same time that person’s room and the view from the window – what an all-encompassing method by which to photograph a person’s living environment!
The originally documentary idea soon expanded in a new direction. The pictures began to form not only a person’s living environment but also to constitute an excursion into the mental landscape: reflections of memories, reveries, fears and dreams.
To take the pictures I transform people’s rooms into camera obscura by covering the windows of the room with blackout plastic and placing on top of the hole cut in it a simple convex lens. Then the view outside the window is reflected upside down into the room forming a dreamy layered space. This and the occupant of the room I then photographed with a conventional camera. At first I used roll film cameras, nowadays a digital camera. The printing techniques also changed in the course of the project: from the chromogenic colour prints of the early years to the present prints on rag and fibre paper with permanent pigments.

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