A TEN-WEEK WORKSHOP
AGES 13-18
This workshop begins in a darkened room at the Lower East Side Girls Club on Avenue D, where we will play with the basic building blocks of the camera (a light source, a lens or aperture, and a surface on which to project an image.) Through play with these elements, we will “invent” the camera in its most ancient and essential form. We’ll proceed in creating camera obscuras of various sizes and use them to pique our curiosity and deepen our understanding of light: as it reflects off the world around us, and as it illuminates the faces of our friends.
Central to our workshop will be a collection of lenses - some new and custom-ground, some antique or salvaged. Through the construction of small camera obscuras around these lenses, we’ll create an opportunity to make discoveries in optics and develop a working knowledge of how light converges to form an image.
Following in the footsteps of photographer Abelardo Morell, we’ll create a room-sized camera obscura, and document the results using long-exposure digital photography. We’ll bring the camera obscura into the artist’s studio, using it in the tradition of renaissance painters as an aid in sketching portraits of each other and landscapes of the Lower East Side.