Camera obscura

A collaboration between first year students at Bezalel Academy's Department of Photography and students from art universities in Turkey, Nigeria, UK, USA and Japan.

During the lockdown, first year students from the Department of Photography turned their rooms at home into a camera obscura. Camera obscura, or dark chamber, is an optical phenomenon where a room is darkened with light entering only through a small hole, resulting in an inverted reflection of the outside view. The interior space becomes a "camera," letting the outside in.

The students photographed these interior spaces during a period of time when we weren't able to venture far from home.

The act of looking out of the window, which we experienced a lot this past year, appears in this project as images comprised of two worlds, "here" and "there," liminal images on the barrier between the observer and the observed.

Many of our partners in this project are still under lockdown. This manner of coping, shared by photography students around the world, can be seen in our project camera.obscura.camera

Lecturer: Ora Lev