Camera Obscura Projects

Latin for dark room, a “camera obscura” is a dark space in which an image of the outside world is formed by light rays passing through an open aperture or lens. Emergent lens-based culture in early modern Europe followed experiments with lens-less cameras obscura in ancient Greece, China and Islam. Through the Enlightenment and early 19th century a wide array of optical devices emerged, including portable cameras obscura that became the first “cameras” with the invention of photography. In Victorian times, walk-in, room-sized cameras obscura were popular attractions at seaside and other sites. Typically site-specific, Donald Lawrence’s camera obscura projects often intersect his interests in the ocean and the culture of sea kayaking, informed by studies of historic cameras obscura and from leading the Camera Obscura Project (SSHRC, 2013-18), in which artists and scholars realized the 2015 Midnight Sun Camera Obscura Festival in Dawson City, Yukon, with the Klondike Institute of Art and Culture. In 2021 the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery anthologized these activities and subsequent gallery-based exhibitions with the publication of Art, Research, Play: The Midnight Sun Camera Obscura Project.