My looking glass camera consists of an old Seagull medium format photo camera from which I have removed the viewfinder box, replacing it with an attachment made from a thin piece of plywood, around twelve centimeters long. Rather than the 6x6cm opening through which the photographer, lowering their gaze to look down, would normally see into the shaft of the viewfinder, the matt screen of the modified camera is covered by the attachment and a tray which is fixed to it. Only a small hole in the tray makes it possible to get the image out of the interior of the square casing. When I slot my smartphone onto the shelf, the phone camera films through the hole and thus transfers the glowing moving image of the viewfinder onto the surface of the LCD screen.
Already in my childhood, the reversed moving image shimmering in the shaft of the viewfinder had a strong power of attraction for me. I was less interested in freezing it in a photograph than in being mesmerized by the moving miniature of light and shadow. In this box, there was an endless film in real-time. On the matt screen, everything appeared to me in magical beauty. The most banal surroundings became mysterious chiaroscuro scenes. Looking through the medium format camera gave me the feeling that nothing was uninteresting. It awakened my curiosity about everything I encountered, as if I had passed through the looking glass like Alice128 and entered a ‘reversed’ version of reality, in which everyday objects came alive and familiar surroundings had to be discovered anew.
I attribute the magical effects of looking through this lens at the surrounding reality – the effect it still has for me today – to two specific effects of analogue medium format technology in particular: the reversal of the image in the viewfinder due to the SLR lens, and the light quality created in the image on the matt screen by the Fresnel lens. The interplay between these two optical devices produces a moving image which represents a section of the surrounding reality synchronously, but at the same time creates a ‘sense of delay’ in the photographer’s perceptions. In comparison with direct observation, the slight alienation created by the reversal and light intensity in the viewfinder provokes a kind of attention-enhancing effect: reversed, objects appear the same, and at the same time different. Our habits of seeing are unsettled, and this means that we look more carefully. That in turn increases my attention to things I did not notice before. Put in a state of necessary awareness, my perceptions grasp the environment through the viewfinder as being more vivid, in the sense that it increases my alertness and my presence of mind.
Rather than directing my gaze automatically at particular things in my surroundings, as I would when observing them directly – e.g. looking at a house, a roof, or a plant – my gaze through the viewfinder begins to wander – along the pale shingles on the façade, my gaze glides upwards to the skeleton of the beams. From this perspective, it looks as if the edge of the roof were cut out, because the contrasting sky creates such strong backlighting. I lower my gaze slightly, a corner of the porch roof enters the image, and I pause: a delicate, wispy little plant is enthroned in the center, above the gutter. It is only then that I see, further down by the gutter, a small rusty spot from which water is dripping. My gaze follows the drops for water onto the paving stones, and so on [G is for Gutter].
The paths taken by our gaze before it lights on something are normally ignored by our perceptions; the movement of our eyes takes place at lightning speed and in a ‘straight line’, to find an immediate focal point again. With a camera as a tool of observation, seeing is slowed down already just by the fact that the viewfinder image does not directly correspond to the usual habits and reflexes of our eyes – panning the camera quickly causes a sense of dizziness. With the looking glass camera, this effect of the camera’s operation becomes particularly significant, because the camera, as described above, is held in front of the chest.129 It is as if the body of person filming becomes fused with the camera: as soon as the body moves, the field of view moves (and vice versa), and this means that movements become more conscious and more gentle. The gaze becomes more haptic, wandering and feeling its way around.
In a paradoxical way, looking through the viewfinder of the looking glass camera transforms my receptivity. Although I only see a section of my surroundings through the viewfinder, meaning that it limits my field of view, my perceptions are expanded, or rather, my attention is increased. As a searching approach, this conditioning can be transferred from the moment of recording to the viewing of the footage, by understanding the viewfinder as an “enabling constraint”:130 the viewfinder is no longer only an instrument to create the best possible image, but is itself already part of the image. The image is the field of view in the viewfinder, as it is filmed by the mobile phone camera. Through this, an image within the image is demarcated: more than half of the field of view remains black. And even the visible viewfinder image remains low definition – both due to analogue optical factors (blurred focus, eyepiece magnifier, weak photosensitivity, grain, etc.), and due to the digital recording of the mobile phone camera.131 Resisting the technological development of HD cameras as an improvement on the eye – to see more optically, more precisely, more clearly, and in that sense ‘better’ – the looking glass camera becomes a means of seeing ‘less’, but more carefully.
This reduced way of seeing, which is at the same time an expanded way of seeing, demonstrates the status of images as material. Regarding a recording as a clue means looking at the image very carefully, exploring it and examining it in various ways, for instance through digital or analogue duplication, enlargement/reduction, and repeated viewing. As ‘precarious’ or ‘poor’ images,132 they carry in them traces of the process of their creation, and they transfer the searching approach into their reception. The looking glass camera challenges viewers to take the material seriously as material, and to examine our own attention and perceptions [A is for Apparatus, for Archive].
Looking glass camera
Trial excerpt
00:30 min
