CAMERA IN CAMERA - photographing the room and its view
Hugh Campbell, School of Architecture, UCD, Dublin, Ireland
The Cuban-American photographer Abelardo Morell has been
working on and off on his ‘Camera Obscura’ series for the past twenty
years. Although his methods have developed somewhat over that
period, the essential modus operandi has remained constant. Morell
transforms a room into a camera obscura by blacking out all
apertures for light save a small hole into which he inserts a lens.
Then he sets up his camera and photographs the result, capturing,
through long exposures of up to eight hours, the inverted image of
the outside world projected through the lens onto the surfaces of the
darkened room. The resulting photographs are both instantly
enchanting and endlessly fascinating.
Morell’s first assignment to his photography students at
Massachusetts College of Art is always to construct a camera obscura,
because, as he explains, although the effect is achieved by the
simplest of means, and has been known for centuries, its capacity to
induce wonder, even in the most knowing, sophisticated viewer,
remains as powerful as ever. (‘It’s alchemical’, says Morell) And of
course, it connects the students back to the beginnings of
photography – the controlled introduction of light through a lens into
a closed chamber in order to produce an image – while at the same
time suggesting that photographic terms, tools and techniques
ultimately represent a kind of falling away from the richness and
potency of the camera obscura. Thus, when Morell’s own camera
records the room as camera, it might be seen as a form of selfanalysis, in which it is recognizing its own origins and maybe also
admitting its own limitations.
[more on this anon]
Among the earliest in the series, and the opening image in the 2004
publication which gathered much of the work, is a picture taken in
the bedroom of Morell’s son Brady. Dropping from the ceiling down
the walls, the presence of the suburban world immediately beyond –
the neighbouring houses, the mature trees – is registered on the
unassuming white surfaces of the room. The fact that this flood of
visual data is inverted and seemingly uncontained contributes to its
disorienting effect (the impact is lessened if the photo is viewed
upside-down). Two realms, one private and fixed in dimensions, the
other untrammeled and extensive are abruptly and comprehensively
conjoined. To this might be added a third - the imaginary realm of
play established by the dinosaurs and castle distributed across the
floor of the room.
The photograph suggests that rooms can always contain other
worlds. Certainly Morell has spoken of the impact on his
photographic practice of having a son. Watching the way in which he
interacted with the world, and constructed worlds within his head
made Morell, as he puts it, ‘look at things longer, with more love and
tenderness’. Whereas previously his work had pursued ‘the decisive
moment’, as proposed by Cartier-Bresson, now he became more
interested in ‘longer looking’. ‘I started paying attention in a way I
hadn’t done before’, he explains, ‘living with the things in front of
me.’1 (To Brady – who made me want to play again, reads the book’s
slightly corny dedication) Even as the photographs in the series
become less tentative in their technique and more spectacular in
their execution, even as the conjunction between interior and
exterior becomes more extreme and dramatic, and even as a concern
for formal composition becomes more pronounced, this underlying
attentiveness to the given remains a constant.
Morell also speaks of how these pictures represent for him a
conscious ‘turn inwards, towards private experience’. Certainly these
pictures seem concerned with states of consciousness, the overlay of
one realm upon another, evoking states of dreaming or of distraction,
demonstrating how the mind can be (perhaps always is) in two
places at once. [think of Jane Eyre in her window seat, ‘shrined in
double retirement’] And the preponderance of bedrooms among the
photographs might lead us to believe, as Luc Sante expounds in his
1
http://www.lensculture.com/morell_interview.html
introduction, that Morell has ‘taken his camera into the dream state
and emerged with proof of what he saw there.’
But what I would like to suggest in this paper is that what is really
being set forth here is a more fundamental affinity between what
these pictures offer us - the room with its view folded back in upon it
- and the experience of mind.
The camera obscura has repeatedly been invoked as a metaphor to
describe how the conscious subject perceives and experiences the
world. As its use as an aid in painting became more widespread
during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, so that parallel
became more commonly asserted. John Locke, for instance, felt that
human understanding was ‘not much unlike a closet wholly shut
from light, with only some little opening left… to let in external
visible resemblances, or some idea of things without.’ ‘[W]ould the
pictures coming into such a dark room but stay there and lie so
orderly as to be found upon occasion’, continued Locke, ‘it would
very much resemble the understanding of a man.’2
Rene Descartes famously made extensive use of the camera obscura
in his elaboration of the relationship between the res extensa (the
world out there) and the res cogitans. He even provides instructions
for making your own: ‘Taking the dead eye of a newly dead person
(or failing that, the eye of an ox or some other large animal)….. cut
away the three surrounding membranes at the back so as to expose a
large part of the humor without spilling any…. No light must enter
this room except what comes through this eye, all of whose parts you
know to be entirely transparent. Having done this, if you look at the
white sheet you will see there, not perhaps without pleasure or
wonder, a picture representing in natural perspective all the objects
outside.’3 Notwithstanding the visceral manner of its making, the
camera obscura became for Descartes an abstracted, ideal figure,
establishing a clear distance between sensation and its perception.
For Richard Rorty, Descartes and Locke shared ‘the conception of the
2
3
Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, II, xi, 17
René Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol I, p.166
human mind as an inner space in which both pains and clear and
distinct ideas passed in review before an Inner Eye… The novelty was
the notion of a single inner space in which bodily and perceptual
sensations… were objects of quasi-observation.’4
This inner space was where the self was constituted as a sovereign
subject – its point of reference not the world at large, but the world
as it appeared in what Locke termed ‘the mind’s presence-room’.5
(where the subject appears to its sovereign self, presumably) Even as
it made that world available, the camera obscura affected a break
between exterior and interior. For Jonathan Crary, in his extensive
critique of this tendency, the camera ‘impels a kind of askesis, or
withdrawal from the world, in order to regulate and purify one’s
relation to the manifold contents of the now ‘exterior’ world. Thus
the camera obscura is inseparable from a certain metaphysic of
interiority: it is a figure for both the observer who is nominally a free
sovereign individual and a privatized subject confined in a quasidomestic space.’6 Hence the camera became ‘a model simultaneously
for the observation of empirical phenomena and for reflective
introspection and self-observation.’ Crary offers Vermeer’s paintings
of The Astronomer and The Geographer as exemplars of a kind of ideal
equilibrium between these different species of interior – the
outward- and the inward-directed. However he notes how the model
can acquire ‘a more self-legislative and authoritative function: the
camera obscura allows the subject to guarantee and police the
correspondence between exterior world and interior representation
and to exclude anything disorderly and unruly.’7
While it is not quite clear how this kind of editing might take place, it
is nonetheless possible to understand how authority might be
assumed over everything seen from the vantage point of the interior.
One might alight upon examples such as the Studiolo at Urbino, in
which the world at large is inscribed in marquetry upon the walls,
Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, 1979) pp49-50
ref
6 Crary, Techniques of the Observer, p.39
7 ibid p…
4
5
perspectivally aligned to the viewpoint of the privileged occupant, or
the Stanza de Segnatura in the Vatican in which the view to
Bramante’s Cortile is echoed and augmented by the vistas opened up
in Raphael’s frescoes. In both instances, drawn space and built space
combine to make spatial and temporal expanses available to the
governing eye: res cogitans meets res extans.
Yet how closely does this kind of idealized viewing relationship, as
adumbrated by Descartes and as achieved in such finely tuned spaces,
actually accord with the altogether more giddying and disorienting
experience of the camera obscura? Far from inducing sensations of
calmness and equilibrium – of things being in balance – they seem
rather to disrupt the perceived order, literally to turn things on their
head. Turning back to Morell’s images, we find the commingling of
the world outside and the world in here to be far less susceptible to
easy analysis, hardly an emblem for rational thought.
Following Locke’s desire, quoted earlier, that ‘the pictures coming
into such a dark room [would] but stay there and lie so orderly’, in
his text Crary interprets the camera as offering precisely that
possibility, and therefore as the logical endpoint of the development
of perspective vision- a kind of seeing in which everything keeps its
distance (‘little Brunneleschi boxes’, the late Kirk Varnedoe called
them).
However in Morell’s images, distance is comprehensively breached.
Vastness is overlaid directly upon intimacy with no regard for where
it lands. Images imprint themselves upon the space. But the word
‘images’ does not feel appropriate – this is an impression of the world
outside, in real and continuous time, being relayed within. It has not
yet been framed and made available as an image.
I might mention in passing here a line of enquiry which I did not
get to pursue in this paper (although the conference abstract
promised I would, so I will), which considers the fact that the
camera struggles to record the room, which gave birth to it –
equipped for distance, it struggles at close quarters,
encountering distortions, pressing against limits. The camera
wants to escape the room – to get to the view beyond it.
In understanding the idea of things becoming images, it is useful to
refer briefly to the pioneering work on perception of the psychologist
J.J. Gibson, specifically to his notion of ‘ecological vision’. Gibson had a
famously low regard for pictures, bemoaning ‘the chronic habit of
civilized men of seeing the world as a picture’ which produced what
he termed the Visual Field, a world of shifting formal and aesthetic
abstract relations, as distinct from the known and invariant qualities
of what he termed the Visual World.8
Borrowing these terms, in Morell’s pictures, we might feel we are
seeing the visual world before it is rendered as a visual field, that we
are seeing things before they become images and hence readily
assimilable at a distance. And whereas it should be noted that for
Gibson, it was in fact the non-image world that was the more stable,
fixed and reliable, because it related directly to and answered human
needs (providing what he termed ‘affordances’) in Morell’s pictures
the visual content is less readily legible - it cannot be fully divorced
from that which produces it and that which makes it visible – it
remains imbricated in both. Hence, the curiously unresolved
character of the images. We are seeing things in the act of becoming,
or at least in the act of being reconstituted.
Most often in Morell’s series, the settings pouring in to light the
interiors are urban. A recurring trope finds a city panorama
emblazoned on the walls and ceiling of a hotel bedroom. Of course
we know the camera obscura’s long association with making
available the grand urban view [Geddes’ Lookout tower etc], and in
Crary’s account, this urge to encompass and possess the city is a
natural extension of the device’s capacity to order and rationalize,
but again these pictures speak of a different kind of relationship – not
of ownership or command but of wonderment and awe on the one
hand, or confusion and bewilderment on the other. The sheer
8
Gibson, The Visual Field and the Visual World, 1952, p149
profusion of visual data, it’s lack of frame or focal point prohibits
comprehension: submission and surrender seem the only options.
[ What a strange thing it is, we think, to walk into a static space and
find it suddenly and completely animated by traces of the world just
left behind. ]
A useful point of reference here might be Boccioni’s well-known
painting, The Street invades the House, which depicts a dynamic scene
in which the vast, unknowable urban realm presses right up against,
and indeed encroaches upon, the private chamber. This image was
made at a period of tumultuous urban growth, its very
ungovernability a source variously of anxiety or exhileration. For the
Futurists it was more the latter than the former, and although it’s not
entirely clear which of these the woman with her back to us is feeling,
the relationship to the city is clearly of a different order than that
presented by Gustave Caillebotte in his Man at a Window from forty
years previously.
The grand hotel was a product of this age of rapid urbanization and
was often pressed into service as an emblem of the new urban
relationships and identities being produced. Sigfried Kracauer
famously described the Hotel Lobby as the modern antithesis of the
temple, a place of anonymity and superficiality, betokening loss of
identity.9 More recently, the hotel has been presented by Maureen
Montgomery and Douglas Tallack among others as a female, quasidomestic space inscribed within the predominantly male world of the
city.10 The focus of such interpretations is almost invariably the
hotel’s lobby and reception rooms, but the same intimations both of
anonymity and of private intimacy might equally be ascribed to the
hotel bedroom.11 In fact, the bedroom might be seen as the ultimate
locus of this ambiguous character – a space possessing all the
trappings of domesticity – the bed, the soft furnishings, the low light
Kracauer ref
Douglas Tallack – New York Sights. Maureen Montgomery, Displaying Women:
Spectacles of Leisure in Edith Wharton’s New York, Routledge 1998
11 Tom Avermaete and Anne Massey have just produced a new book on the
modern hotel lobby, with almost no mention of the individual room
9
10
– but only ever transiently occupied. [ - think about how the hotel is
meant to make you feel at home while away] Of course there are very
practical reasons for which Morell has so often chosen hotel rooms as
his location – they are hireable by the day, they guarantee privacy,
they offer removal and elevation from one’s surroundings. But these
same qualities all lend a deeper resonance to the resulting images.
Implicit in the use of such private rooms is the suggestion that they
house a single occupant or a single viewer. As other papers in this
session demonstrate, the single room not only contains the single
sovereign subject, it can stand as its equivalent... `One of the most
renowned instances of this conflation of the confined room with the
individual consciousness is Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story
The Yellow Wallpaper, in which the protagonist’s fragile mental state
finds its uncanny counterpart in the vivid wallpaper of the room in
which she is locked. Gradually, the wallpaper begins to acquire lifelike qualities so that the very walls of the room appear animate.
In closing, it is worth returning once again to the correlation between
the camera obscura and conscious experience. The Cartesian view of
the mind was dependent upon the idea that it was, in some sense,
occupied – that there was a homunculus inside the mind interpreting
all incoming data (what Daniel Dennett terms ‘the Central Meaner’).
But in Morell’s photographs, the conscious subject is absent. The
camera acts as a surrogate recording device. No individual volition or
agency is necessary; nobody is bearing witness and yet witness is
borne. (Morell himself does not remain in the room during what is
typically an eight-hour exposure. He tried it once, he recalls, but
found it a near-hallucinatory experience) What is portrayed is an
automatic, recursive loop in which one camera sits inside another,
seeing it in the act of seeing.
This might be seen as a bleak, mechanistic view of subjectivity, but in
fact it accords much more closely with more recent interpretations of
consciousness, which see it as something endless, automatically
produced rather than something rationally constructed. Recently,
Thomas Metzinger has proposed what he calls the ‘phenomenal selfmodel’.12
Consciousness he argues, is the appearance of a world. The essence of
the phenomenon of conscious experience is that a single and unified
reality becomes present: if you are conscious, a world appears to you.
Consciousness, for Metzinger, is a very special phenomenon, because
it is part of the world and contains it at the same time.13
In other words, minds - like the rooms in Abelardo Morell’s
photographs - encompass the worlds that encompass them.
END
A brief coda - if possible – the shift between objective and subjective
image making – or the nonsense of these terms – and the play
Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of
the Self, New York: Basic Books, 2009, p4
13 Metzinger 15
12