At Jill Enfield’s camera obscura workshop at the Pictorial Foundation in Newburgh, a room becomes a photographic instrument
Entering a walk-in camera obscura requires a moment of adjustment. The door closes, the outside light disappears, and the visitor waits for their eyes to adapt. Then an image begins to emerge across the darkened room: the sidewalk overhead, the sky underfoot, everything upside down and reversed. “After a couple of minutes, your eyes are used to it, and then you can look and see what’s happening around you,” photographer Jill Enfield says. “You can see people walking on the sidewalk on the ceiling.”
On September 19 and 20, Enfield will lead a hands-on workshop inside the Pictorial Foundation’s new walk-in camera obscura in Newburgh. Assisted by photographer Chris Peregoy, Enfield will guide participants through the fundamentals of image-making, from light entering an aperture to the production of a finished print.
A camera obscura can be created by sealing a room against light except for a small opening. Light travels through the aperture in straight lines, projecting an inverted image of the outside world onto the opposite surface. The phenomenon predates photography by centuries and was used by artists as a drawing aid. It also remains the operating principle behind every camera.
During the workshop, photographic paper will be attached to a wall inside the structure and exposed to the projected image. Participants will then develop the paper in the darkroom, creating a negative that can be scanned and digitally reversed into a positive print. “We’re doing something that was being done before the advent of photographic paper and enlargers,” Enfield says, “and then using digital technology. We’re spanning the centuries.”
Participants can also experiment with small pinhole cameras in the foundation’s courtyard. No previous photographic experience is required. Enfield estimates that producing an image takes 45 minutes to an hour once the process begins, although visitors may encounter some waiting time.
The workshop accompanies “Oculus Obscura,” an exhibition of work by 10 artists exploring camera obscura and pinhole photography. The show includes cameras constructed from paperboard, wood, and ceramics made with silt and clay collected from Hudson Valley estuaries, along with digital cameras adapted for pinhole use. Enfield is represented by cyanotype landscapes made from pinhole photographs, in which long exposures allow clouds, water, trees, and people to blur and shift.
That element of duration is central to Enfield’s work. She also practices wet-plate collodion photography, another slow process that records movement instead of freezing the world into sharp-edged stillness. “I like to see that movement and the ethereal look of those images,” she says.
Enfield discovered alternative processes while studying photography at NYU as an older student. She had little interest in treating the image produced by a camera as a finished product. “I’ve never really liked taking pictures and having them be an exact replication of what we’ve seen,” she says. “I like to have my hand showing.”
That tactile approach has acquired renewed appeal in an era when nearly everyone carries a camera and accumulates thousands of largely unseen images. Enfield teaches alternative processes at Parsons School of Design, where she watched enrollment decline with the arrival of digital photography. Now her courses have waiting lists. “Students are tired of being on their computers,” she says. “They want to have that tactile experience and the handmade product.”
For Enfield, the workshop’s pleasures begin with the simplest revelation: a tiny opening can turn a room into a camera. “I love seeing how excited people get,” she says. “You see their faces, and it’s like, ‘Wow, look at that.’”
The Walk-In Camera Obscura Workshop takes place September 19 and 20, 10am–4pm, at the Pictorial Foundation in Newburgh. Admission is $200, including supplies; advance registration is encouraged. “Oculus Obscura” remains on view through November 1.
