Root Work Journal - Convening in the Ark - Volume 1, Issue 1
Ancestral Light Capture: Camera Obscura
Tony M. Bingham
Miles College - Birmingham, Alabama
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.47106/4rwj.11044739
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Ancestral Light Capture: Camera Obscura -...light rays entering the eye and light rays entering the glass globe placed inside a small camera obscura - Codex Atlanticus, fol 337, ca 1500 Leonardo Da Vinci..".I select cast off materials to create my cameras, and with them, construct an imagery that interprets the humanity of a cast off people". "A Second of Your Time" Prospect 1.5 Biennial 2010, New Orleans. I found fragments of glass bottles and glass shards, through wanderings in the back spaces of buildings behind the town square in Marion, Alabama and in the East Smithfield community in Birmingham. a community erased through highway construction. Those glass fragments (Da Vinci's" Glass Globe"), functioned as a lens for allowing the light to pass through, capturing the spiritual memories of those black folks who last touched the glass. The passage of the light from the glass fragments was embedded onto the film, which had been placed inside my small camera obscura/pinhole camera.
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