Zanzibar / Summer 2023
I wasn’t trying to find a camera obscura in the maze of Stone Town streets. I was surprised to find one. I guess I had narrow-mindedly assumed that Zanzibar was an unlikely site for this, but in fact Africa and the Middle East has a long history of photography and the camera obscura or Al-Bayt al-Muthlim in Arabic. No one could tell me much about this one, but In 1883, Sultan Barghash bin Said, ruler of Zanzibar, included it as part of his new palace which he called The House of Wonders—wondrously Zanzibar’s first building to have electricity, an elevator and running water alongside marble floors, paneled walls and imposing columns. In those days it was both fashionable and a sign of embracing the frontiers of science to have a private camera obscura, and the Sultan was a well-travelled man.
Some photos have survived that might have been taken in this room but there is no evidence that this was a true camera obscura. That is, that it was a darkened space that acts as the inside of a camera itself where you can watch the outside world projected via a small lens onto the walls, ceiling and floor—flipped upside-down and inverted. But it might have been, as the House of Wonders was built to be seen, to display and to amaze. It is said that wild animals were on display in front of the building. The clock tower that housed the camera obscura was added in 1897 and would have been for the family, women and special guests of the household, designed and angled to watch the bustling streets below.
I went looking for an old photography studio and was thrilled to find Capital Art Studio, running continuously since 1930 where I met photographer Ramesh Oza, the son of the studio founder. His father became the semi-official royal photographer of Sultan Khalifa, a known patron of the arts and letters. Ramesh confirmed the camera obscura story but no details. He sat stoic, surrounded by his and his father’s creativity, watching his town teetering between continuity and a money-driven transformation into a boutique tourist destination.
City Tavern Club, Washington D.C.
Curating a camera obscura installation with photographers Mark Zimmerman and Nancy Breslin in Washington DC inside a preserved federal era tavern where Geroge Washington once imbibed. Capturing the hustle and bustle of today's Georgetown street outside in our upside-down, backwards art installation. Stay tuned to see how we did it, the challenges we faced and some of the images and time-lapse video we create....J.R. Eyerman and the Drive in Movie
Not Being TherePhotography and photojournalism are in many ways simply a patch between those were there and those who were not. When an image ends up standing in for an event, experience or person, it can acquire iconic status and this is especially true for photos that got picked up by news outlets or shared as telling evidence of something that happened. One image comes to stand for thousands of others taken many thousands of times by thousands of people. Fast forward to today and there are so many more digital images of an event, a person, a place than there are people who were actually there. The visual record is gi-normous and growing so fast it needs increasing examination, research and understanding. Archivists are overwhelmed. Archiving saves and sometimes contextualizes, but it does not explain.
The “A picture is a thousand words” idea, attributed to Syracuse Post-Standard newspaper editor Tess Flanders in 1911 drove the creation of the photo-based version of Life Magazine in 1936 and the widespread adoption of photography by other news and other outlets. Life Magazine alone had a total of 101 salaried photographers when it ceased publication in 1972. It was the heyday of salaried photographers; now so many have to be freelance and for hire. Sent on assignment but able to experiment with techniques and style as long as the images were news not just art, Life photographers, like their Magnum counterparts, defined photojournalism. As a staff photographer for Time-Life from 1942 to 1961, J.R. Eyerman once said “Pressing the button for LIFE magazines just made the world stand still.”