Stunningly Vivid Camera Obscura Photography Brings the Outside In

A boat sails across the ceiling, down the wall and across the crisp white hotel bed, into the carpet. This is no projection, no Photoshop and no witchcraft, but the aquarium-like effect of acclaimed photographer Robyn Stacey's recent experiments with a 5th-century BC technology: camera obscura. During a residency at Melbourne's Sofitel on Collins Street and visits to hotels in other cities, Stacey photographed scenes of exterior cityscapes imposed onto hotel interiors using tools from opposite ends of the technological spectrum, a simple camera obscura and a high-tech Hasselblad DSLR.

The result is Guest Relations, a new series on show now at Sydney's Stills Gallery. What can you expect to see? Mysterious people, supposedly guests of the hotel, caught in moments of contemplation while the city hangs suspended above their heads or washes over the walls around them in startlingly sharp definition, suggesting a collision of public and private life.

During her residency, Stacey recognised that just a photo of the hotel's famous views would constitute nothing more than a postcard. So she turned to camera obscura to solve the creative problem. "I like layers in work," she says. "The room sort of reveals itself to you."

Because of the technical constraints of camera obscura — sometimes there'd only be a 40-minute window to shoot a long exposure of a motionless, torch-lit human subject while the sun was in the right spot — surprises would emerge. For example, in one image, there's "the way the war memorial comes in, the angle it comes in, and how [the female subject] is lying under it. So there's all that thing about, what does a war memorial signify, and what about the fact that she's female? It's open then, for people to read into it how they might." Stacey likes the film-still sense of narrative in the tableaux, raising questions of "What's happened in that room, or why are [these people] there?"

The beauty of camera obscura, which she's only been working with since February this year, is that "it's magical. Turn on the light and it’s not there. It only happens in the dark." While hers required a laser-cut hole and a diopter lens, she points out that anyone could make one with black cardboard and a pen to punch the hole through it. She hopes to progress to filming these interiorscapes. "What you get in the room that you don’t get in a still image is movement. Sometimes you get these fantastic cloudscapes. They’re just rolling toward you, and they go all over the bed and the floor. It's like you're in the clouds."

Stacey's advice to aspiring artists? She cites the quote often attributed to Goethe: Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. "[There can be] too much thinking and not enough doing. But they have to come together. If you have an idea, don't wait, do it now. It might not come out how you wanted, but it will open into something else. The work will lead you, but you've gotta go into it. You can't stand back from it."

Robyn Stacey's Guest Relations is on at the Stills Gallery in Sydney until November 9. See more of her photography in her online portfolio.