Camera Obscura

For my final school subject, I, like any other student in Sweden, had to carry out a project on something within the limits of your program (mine was science). I wanted to combine physics and philosophy in some way but without knowledge of how. The more I thought about the meeting of the two subjecs however, the more I realised that photography is the optimal combination of optics and aesthetics. To explain the function of the most primitive of photography, one must know the qualities of light, but to explain the result of the photography itself, one uses its abilities to value the optics, how light were absorbed/emitted to project a motif that you in terms of aesthtics either consider beautiful or not.

To explore how light functions both opticially and aesthetically speaking, I decided to build a camera from a matchbox and photographic film. A pinhole to be accurate, using the phenomenon of camera obscura. Since the aperture of the pinhole is consant, the shutter alone determines how much light is to pass in to the dark room, being the housing. In conclusion, the project could be described as a study on how light and time (exposure time) collaborate to project an image.

Above are four of my favorite images, shot on very cloudy days with exposure times of five minutes (except the third with an exposure time of one minute). The second and the fourth image picture a stream and a crowd in movement.