These images were created during an artist-in-residence program in Lanesboro, Minnesota through the Cornucopia Art Center funded by the Jerome Foundation.  The photographs are records of “pinhole projections” by creating camera obscurae inside historic buildings in Lanesboro, Minnesota.  Pinhole projections are created when light enters a darkened room, a camera obscura, through a tiny hole.  The inverted projection of the outside scene forms on the opposite wall of the room.  Thus, the room itself becomes a huge camera with the people inside able to see the image prior to its capture on film.

This phenomenon is by no means my invention.  For thousands of years, astronomers used camera obscurae to observe solar eclipses and other astronomical events.  More recently, Abelardo Morrel has documented landmarks throughout the world via this process.  I first noticed the results of a darkened room with a small aperture projecting light as a child while sitting in my bedroom one afternoon with the shade drawn.  The shade had a hole in it and each time a car drove by my window I would notice a flash of light from one side of the room to the other.  Many years later, as a teaching assistant at the Maine Photographic Workshops, I set up a similar camera obscura to introduce the fundamentals of photography to a group of students. During graduate school, I created another camera obscura and went a step further by photographing the projection displayed inside the room.  Long exposure times are necessary, and therefore action is not recorded.  Rather, the image captured on film portrays the intimate crevices and contours of the room as well as the stationary scene outside.  The residency in Lanesboro enabled me to create these photographs, but the process allowed me to develop a relationship with the community and share the mysteriousness of the camera obscura.  These images created in Lanesboro, Minnesota will be exhibited at the Cornucopia Art Center in Lanesboro during November and December 2005.