Fisherton Residency – Week 3, Origins of Photography
I am now half way through my first full week at Fisherton Primary school, and mid way through my first project, which is an introduction to a couple of processes that pre date photography.
I am focusing on two activities this week, with the younger ages groups I’m running Cyanotype workshops using sunlight to expose found objects from the environment onto photographic paper. And with the older groups I’ve been making Camera Obscura’s and using them to initiate a drawing exercise.
Both of these activities are drawn from experiences and interests I picked up while at Art College in Dundee. One of the aspects I enjoyed most during my course was the interaction with my contemporaries and the conversations that arouse around all the diverse art practices people were developing. I girl in my year spent a lot of time researching and producing cyanotypes, so even though I had not explored this medium myself I felt well acquainted with it.
For the school workshop I have collected an array of different seaweeds, pebbles, shells, glass, small pieces of wood and other debris found on or around the beach. These objects will be placed onto the photo-sensitive paper and left in direct sunlight to expose for approximately 15minutes, then to finish the exposure the print is washed until the water runs clear. I am going to run my first cyanotype workshop tomorrow morning and am excited to see how the children respond to this simple photographic process. I also intend to give some background information about the origins of the process to the older groups.
The English scientist and photographer Sir John Hershal first discovered the cyanotype in 1842 but it was the work of Anna Atkins, credited as the first female photographer that gave this process its photographic function. Atkins was a botanist and collector of seaweed, ferns and other plant life, which she documented in a series of limited edition cyanotype books, composed of the silhouettes of her specimens.
The second activity is a direct progression from my own art practice. During my final year at Art College my work focused on creating objects that provoke a heightened sensory interaction with the natural elements. I created works that engaged with the rain and wind and two that were designed to interact with sunlight. One of these was an Origami Camera Obscura designed to be a pocket artwork used to encourage exploration and viewing the environment in an alternate way – everything viewed through a camera obscura is projected both upside down and back to front.
I have already held two of my three camera obscura workshops with the pupils and they have largely been very successful. I started with an introduction to the history of the camera obscura and it’s function to artists before the invention of the camera, I then explained briefly the function of the lens and the correlation to how lenses work in cameras and the human eye. Finally I showed the group the work of one of my favorite artists Chris Drury, who creates camera obscura rooms or Cloud Chambers which have a lens and sometimes a mirror in the roof of a small windowless shelter made of stone, banked earth or wood which projects the outside environment onto the floor or walls of the inside space. The Cloud Chambers are situated in different locations and so project a variety of views of sky, trees, mountains and water.
Following this introduction we made our own small cardboard camera obscura’s using a small plastic lens and a piece of tracing paper to act as a viewing screen. Once the group had competed their Camera Obscura’s we took them outside to practice focusing the image by adjusting the distance between lens and screen and finding a location that gave us the best quality projection. Once we found this location I asked the group to draw what they saw on the projection screen, an exercise that demands that they observe exactly what they are looking at and not what they assume to be there. This produced some great results, which I look forward to exhibiting at the end of the residency.
