Portable Camera Obscura

The installation Portable Camera Obscura is a walk-in, room-sized camera. A temporary architecture, it is a lightproof tent environment that projects an image of the outside view onto the walls of the tent with a simple lens. The image that projects into the tent is unfixed and only experienced by those who bear witness at that moment.

First positioned in the location of popular photographic views in Waterton Lakes National Park, Alberta, in summer 2009, participants were able to enter the tent to see the landscape projected onto the wall of the structure. Tracking historical photographs, the camera was installed in several popular locations for image-making in the park. I also mounted an expedition style journey into the back-country of Waterton. I invited community members that ‘speak for nature’ (wardens, ecologists, environmentalists, environmental educators) to attempt to re-locate an historical photograph. With me as the guide, we went on a quest to investigate historical photographs, to experiment with the distance between representation and represented, and to play with what a more ethically and ecologically sound relationship between image and place might look like. We took the archive out for a walk as a way to transform the historical photograph from a document (or monument) back into a located, community act. The tent was an experiential foundation for communication. A collaborative space, and an architecture of attention, the installation was built for loitering, conversations, and looking differently at a view and at a photographic act. This work focuses on active and dynamic experiences as catalysts for generating communicative processes that can spark new knowledge about nature and representation in Canada.

In the gallery space, Portable Camera Obscura forms a part of a larger project of gallery works that I install as social work-spaces to investigate archival photographs. One step removed from the site of production, and one more level of mediation, inside the Portable Camera Obscura the viewer sees a 50 x 72 cm hand tinted mid twentieth century photograph illuminated, “Waterton Lake from the Prince of Wales Hotel in Canada” taken in mid 20th century by the photographer Kabel, an employee of Great Northern Rail.

Camera obscura, tent, tripod, photographic reproduction

All rights reserved, Trudi Lynn Smith

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Contributions

Artist: Trudi Lynn Smith

[Bio c. 2017] Trudi is an artist and anthropologist. She works with cultural practices of media and archives. Her current research interests include the role of entropy within archives, and helping to re-establish connections between contemporary photography practices, camera obscuras. She received an interdisciplinary PhD in Anthropology and Visual Art from University of Victoria, Canada. Trudi's artistic and academic practices are platforms to address the significance of photography by breaking it down to its fundamental properties. Her work explores the way that places like National Parks are maintained through photography; the relationships between archives and photography; and the structure of...

Artists' Statements

Projects

Ethnographic Terminalia: Philadelphia

Ethnographic Terminalia first exhibition was a group exhibition of installation works that showed at the Ice Box gallery (Crane Arts, Philadelphia)