Word: obscura
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Morell's best-known series of photographs is based on the camera obscura (Latin for "dark room"). When a room is completely sealed against light except for a tiny hole, an inverted image of the world outside is projected onto the opposite wall. The pinhole camera works on this same principle of optics. Morell seals off the rooms of houses and hotels to make them into camera obscuras, and then sets up his camera inside the room, so as to capture the projected image, distorted by the furnishings of the chosen room, over the course of a long exposure...
...gallery's entrance, grayscale clapboard houses cascade behind the dimpled shadows of a rumpled bed. The result is spellbinding. Forget the brainless integration of disparate images accessible to anyone with Adobe Photoshop; Morell wields a technique known since the time of Plato (think the Cave Allegory): the camera obscura, in which a single aperture allows for the projection of outside images onto the walls of a darkened room. It is comforting to note, as Morell's students reputedly do, "that something this low tech could be so magical...
James Casebere's surreal photographs of plaster models and catacomb-like spaces display the camera obscura method in a markedly different manner. For Casebere, his studio becomes a metaphorical representation of the pinhole camera; his eerie black and white prints, though smaller and less enchanting than Morell's work, beguile the viewer. In "Toilets," a dye destruction print, 11 toilet bowls march across the back wall of something resembling a prison cell: the third bowl in the sequence lies dejectedly on its side, a single white beam illuminating its slightly skewed seat. The accompanying placard describes the photographer's intentions...
...whose obsession is a jet engine the size of a truck muffler bolted to go-cart wheels; he sits in front of the glowing, screaming toy and zips across the alkali flats. It's nothing like piloting a computer. And there's the elaborate camera obscura some thoughtful person usually sets up, big enough to walk into and see the desert upside down. And this year, if my girls can be talked into it, we'll squish in the mud of nearby hot springs and wander around as dried-mud people, just like everyone else...
...furious (Meg Ryan's Maggie). They meet (about as uncute as any couple in the history of screwball farce) because Linda (Kelly Preston), his former fiance, has moved into a Lower Manhattan loft with Anton (Tcheky Karyo), her former lover. Sam, an astronomer, has rigged up a camera obscura in a tumbledown tenement across from their love nest, which he uses to snark on them. He charts the many ups and very rare downs of their affair, hoping to predict a big bang in their happy little universe. Maggie, a photographer, bugs the place, adding sound to his pictures, thereby...