Photographers Turn Entire Apartments Into Pinhole Cameras

The pinhole camera is an idea that dates back to the ancient Greeks and beyond. The basic premise is that light entering through a tiny hole can display inverted pictures of the outside world in a darkened room. A typical working model of this lens-less camera features a light-proof box with a small hole cut in it, but this won’t do for French photographers Romain Alary and Antoine Levi. In their project Stenop.es they turn entire apartments into camera obscuras.

By turning rooms into pinhole cameras, they project the outside world onto the inside, blocking out all the light except for the small amount let through the pinholes, the city outside merges with the interior of the apartment. The effect creates a collage of tactile and projected, turning upside down buildings into surreal reflections of kitchen implements and planting a row of trees jittering on apartment walls.

From their website:

Stenop.es is an experimental visual project using a primitive technique: The Camera Obscura. Applied to an original scale, the project is based on projection from the outside to the inside. Two layers are merging while the landscapes takes place in the interior's intimacy.

Alary and Levi have created two films for the project so far, the one above is in Paris and the one below is from Pushkar, India.

[via Design Boom]

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