Imposing Views - Camera Obscura Installation
All cameras - film, digital, even the human eye - work the same way.
A hole or aperture in a light-tight box allows light reflected off a subject outside the box to enter , producing an image of the subject inside the box.
Because rays of light travel in a relatively straight line, the light that enters from the top of the scene travels to the bottom of the box. The image that appears in the box is inverted, and the projected scene appears upside down and backwards. In conventional cameras, there is a charge coupled device or media such as film to “store” the image. The inversion is corrected for by our brains, by printing the film negative, or by computer algorithms.
The series Imposing Views is a growing collection of images from camera obscura installations that takes advantage of the qualities of the camera obscura to combine interior and exterior views and explore the inextricable link between the spaces we inhabit and the surrounding environment, as well the relationships between architecture, landscape, and the human body.
Colour Pinhole Photographs
All photographs are digital prints from 35mm color film, taken with multiple-aperture pinhole cameras.
In Nederland Colorado there is a monument to Sacajeweya and the spirit of peace and community the First Nations people of the area offered early explorers.
The monument consists of a bronze statue in a little garden just off the highway, and a bird bath with a stone in it. Perhaps due to some kind of ore in the rock, when the bird bath contains rainwater the pool is the deep red colour of old blood. It is a stone’s throw from the mining museum which features some of the first technology used to reshape the landscape through the exploitation of natural resources.
Short Bio
Maggie Ross is a Manitoba-raised photographer working primarily in the media of pinhole photography and camera obscura installations exploring the notions of urbanization, class, consumer culture, and our changing landscape. By using handmade multiple-aperture cameras, she combines images in a way that edit out the geographical and temporal space that separates the subjects, and allows them to be considered in new contexts, thus subverting the traditional notion of the objectivity of both the camera and the photographer.
Maggie has taught classes and workshops in alternative photography at the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba, and received her Fine Arts degree from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 2008. She is photographing in the United States and Canada, and is part of the Manitoban film based photographic exhibition Positive/Negative, currently on display in Winnipeg, Canada.
www.maggieross.info
