April 11, 2011, Featured Articles, Current

Jo Babcock: The Invented Camera

Sun, Apr 10, 2011

Jo Babcock uses each home-made camera to create a single photograph. Often the container seeks out its real-world companion -- a log cabin maple syrup tin locating an actual log cabin, a coffee urn camera discovering a neon coffee pot sign. Some pairings allow the viewer to suspend disbelief and become the object -- as a Band Aid box viewing its patient; a detergent box studies a coin-operated washing machine; a gasoline can observing an abandoned gas station. After its brief career, each camera becomes a sculptural art object, as presented and offered together with its photograph. These one-of-a-kind paired sets keep the codependent relationships intact.

"My work merges aspects of photography, sculpture and conceptual art. During the past twenty five years I have created over one hundred and fifty simple cameras from a plethora of recycled objects. Using only a needle, tin foil, black tape and some film, I can make a functional camera out of practicly anything. I've made cameras out of coffee pots, maple syrup cans, suitcases, lunchpails, soup cans, file boxes; I even turned a VW van and an Airstream motorhome into giant cameras. On their own, these tools operate in a symbiotic manner photographing subjects which relate to the camera/object.: the suitcase camera photographs a hotel; the maple syrup camera photographs a log cabin; the coffee pot camera photographs a neon sign that reads "Good Coffee". I use inexpensive lenses or pinholes to make my cameras. A pinhole is made by piercing a needle-sized hole through a thin piece of metal. This small, precise hole projects a clear, dreamy photographic image without using a lens. These miniature apertures require long, tedious exposures but yield an extremely deep depth of field."

"In addition, a "worm's eye" voyeuristic point of view emphasizes tension in my art work. To say the least, my final results are varied. This is partly due to the unpredictability of the process and to the fact that my cameras are all different sizes. I don't even stick to one type of film. I load the smaller cameras with color or black and white film cut to the size of the back of the camera (1" to 10" wide). By contact printing these various sized negatives, I try to underscore the relationship between subject, process, and that camera's unique vision. On the roof of both the VW van camera and the Airstream motorhome camera, I installed simple lens/mirror devices which function like periscopes. Inside the darkened camera obscura, I can expose images directly onto 40" x 60" sheets of color photographic paper spread out across the floor. Once developed, these projections become unique, paper negatives. These solar enlargers on wheels birth unearthly landscapes, distorted roadside attractions and scenes of destruction. I view my van cameras as postmodern versions of the horsedrawn photographic wagons previously driven by early western photographers."

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