Obs-cu-ra
Photographers turn their homes into cameras to portray life in Covid-19 times.
The essay was designed by photographer Bruno Alencastro from his apartment in Rio de Janeiro.
The history of photography is directly related to the point of view of a window. It was from there that, in 1826, Niepce took the first photograph in history. 8 hours of exposure, there, from the point of view of the window of his house in the countryside of France!
Beyond photography, throughout the history of art, the window as a point of view is a recurring motif among painters, portraitists, filmmakers and visual artists in general. From “Young woman at a window”, by Salvador Dalí, to “Rear Window”, by Hitchcock.
A place that starts to be re-signified by different contemporary artists around the world in Covid-19 times. Nowadays, the window starts to represent the border and the abyss between the outside and the inside world. Freedom and confinement.
“As a photographer, I also wanted to do my essay during the quarantine, but no idea seemed original to me. And it was in that moment of pause, in which we have been turning to the past in search of answers for when all this is over, that I had a snap: the camera obscura principle! In other words: a box or a completely dark room with a small entrance of light projects, in the opposite part of this opening, an inverted image of the external scene”, Alencastro explains.
Inspired by all this, he completely isolated the light entrances of the apartment where he lives on the 4th floor of a building in the Copacabana neighborhood, in Rio de Janeiro, and did a first test. “Even my dog has stopped for 4 seconds so that I could get a balanced exposure between the darkness of my room and the projection of the world outside!”, He jokes.
In the impossibility of producing other confined images, Alencastro invited other photographers who agreed to turn their houses into large-format cameras obscura and captured life in times of the pandemic. Each with its uniqueness. Achievements and losses. Wishes and privileges. Fears and hopes.
“From video calls and WhatsApp conversations, I started giving them tips on how to get the best technical result and also what I would like each photo to portray. One of them was on his birthday, so I suggested that he held a candle to symbolize this unprecedented situation in his life: spending a birthday alone “, says Alencastro.
The result is the obs-cu-ra photo essay, characterized by a dark and enigmatic atmosphere, such as the indecipherable future that no one knows for sure. “Symbolically, what we see projected is a world upside down, just like the chaos that we follow around the world”, reflects the photographer.
Bruno Alencastro
instagram.com/brunoalencastro
