Whangarei Camera Obscura Sculpture takes us back to the beginnings of photography

Essay by John B Turner for PhotoForum, 20 February 2021

When Diane Stoppard made her first pinhole camera as a photography student at Wellington Polytechnic 35 years ago, she had no idea that she would lead the charge for Whangarei to become the first city in New Zealand to boast its own life-sized camera obscura today. 

“The Camera Obscura Sculpture is finally coming to life after a 9-year journey!”, she told me, after Glenn Busch, the recently retired head of photography at Canterbury University’s School of Fine Arts, suggested that I contact her for details about this remarkable building three weeks before it opened.  “It is an 8 metre spiral steel sculpture within which is a Camera Obscura room. Due to open on the 20th November, it views Whangarei's Te Mata ā Pohe bascule bridge and includes CCTV cameras throughout offering the public security plus an interactive art experience’, Diane explained.

A five by three-and-a-half-metre room with a large upside-down and back to front animated panoramic view in colour in one direction, and closed-circuit security cameras watching the watchers from another?  That sounded a bit like a freaky update of a scene from Lewis Carrol’s Alice in the Looking Glass. I don’t think that’s what the early makers and users of the camera obscura or the makers of cameras for the inventors of photography in the early 19th Century had in mind, but the odd mix of ancient and new does seem appropriate, somehow, as Stoppard mused, in our surveillance saturated 21st Century.

‘Because every internal area of the obscura is filmed with 7 cameras and displayed on the video screen on the exterior of the sculpture’, she explained, ‘everyone entering the view of the obscura room (be it on the water, bridge or in front) becomes a performer in the space. The kids that we took into our trial wanted to go outside so they could hold their arms up and touch the heads of their friends inside, whilst watching it on the screen.

“This is quite a unique version of Obscura experience as it does not have the typical periscope-type projection onto a table, but the image fills the entire room. We have a mechanised aperture system which offers the public the chance to reduce the aperture and experience the room darkening and see the gradually increased depth of field.’

She promised to send me more information and images closer to the opening time, because the giant camera obscura was then covered in scaffolding while the roof was being completed and, as busy as she was, and did so.

All cameras, of course, are essentially camera obscura: a dark room, that is, into which the light outside enters through a small aperture to appear like a colour movie projected upside-down and back to front on the opposite wall. They are that way because light travels in a straight line, and that reminds us that our eyes see the world the same way before our brains invert the view to help preserve our balance and sanity. They had the equipment, but as we know from the inventors of photography in the early 19th Century, their real challenge was to capture the fleeting images they could see and make them permanent.  

Today, we have the choice of recording the mysterious fleeting images from Whangarei’s magnificent camera obscura either in motion, or frozen in time, on our electronic telephones.

Photography took hold as a craze in the mid-19th Century, and it’s no coincidence that the topsy-turvy, nature of the camera and the Tweedledum and Tweedledee character of lookalike photographs inspired the author of Alice’s surreal adventures in Wonderland. The author of those popular novels, the Rev Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll), was an avid amateur photographer. It would be interesting to see what connections a group inside the Camera Obscura would make if they were read Carroll’s Alice Through the Looking Glass today?

Asked why they promote the Camera Obscura as an interactive sculpture, Diane explained that when she saw camera obscura in public places overseas in the late 1990s, they were mostly of the periscope type that projected onto a table. But they weren’t very engaging because it was “obvious it had a lens and was just something you looked at. This made it seem important to have a significant sculpture that celebrated ‘place’ and lured the viewer in to experience that ‘place’ in a new way - the immersive obscura room!”

Historically, she pointed out, Camera Obscuras in Europe were sited on waterways, the sea and river. Hence their sculpture was inspired by the ship building and maritime history of the Hatea river in Whangarei. “The exterior weathering steel reflects the hull and bow of a ship and the detailed front design talks about the land (whenua) and environment of the river from a Māori and European perspective.” The artists who made the front design panel encasing the lens were Poutama Hetaraka and Trish Clarke.

“I came up with the idea of a sculptural Obscura when I spotted an advert calling for public Sculpture for a proposed sculptural walk at the time of the rugby world cup in 2011. I phoned my architect friend Felicity Christian and we whipped together a design similar to the current form offering the spiral footprint, which allows the viewer to enter the sculpture without using doors. Our proposal cost more that the sculpture walk budget so we were urged to return in the future. We invited sculptor Trish Clarke to join us and put forward a new larger design to be sited viewing Whangarei’s iconic bascule bridge ’Te Matau ā Pohe’ in 2015.” [i]

The entire design has been a collaboration between these three creative women working with numerous engineering and building companies who donated their time and expertise. Their distinctive Camera Obscura incorporates a lens with an adjustable aperture. This creates a different and sharper image than the basic pinhole camera with a roughly punctured patch of aluminum tinfoil, or a more perfect hole drilled and polished in a patch of copper, depending on one’s personality and technical bent. 

“The variable aperture mechanism., which I found in the Ukraine, from an unidentified camera, is 70mm diameter across at its largest and 15mm at its smallest.” Diane noted. “The engineers from Culham Engineering designed a brass plate that holds the aperture plus a 75mm wide +0.25 diopter lens with a focal length of 4m. Then they designed the massive unit (see photo below with me and the guys) that enables the public to turn a large wheel which closes down the aperture and in doing so - darkens the room and sharpens the image! When the wheel is released the aperture resets itself to widest and brightest aperture so the first visitors will always be greeted by a bright and slightly soft image.”  

One does not need to be an engineer to make a pinhole camera, and that is part of the charm of pinhole photography that Diane Stoppard fell in love with. Any container that can be made light-tight and is big enough to fit a piece of unexposed film or photographic paper into it, can be used as a camera.  All it then needs is a pin hole opposite the light sensitive material, a removable “lid” to function as a lens cap to prevent unwanted light in – a dark place to load the camera, and after the exposures have been completed, a dark room with the basic chemicals of pre-digital analogue photography to watch the magic of the latent image emerging in the developer.

A unique quality and distinctive charm of the lens-less pinhole image is that it is equally unsharp from edge to edge, which makes everything depicted, from extremely close to far away, appear to be equally focused.  Introducing a lens to the pin hole will make the image sharper in parts – those objects within the plane of focus – with the rest of the picture less sharp, as with a normal camera.

Much to her delight, Stoppard told me, an old flat mate had recently returned to her the very first pinhole box camera she had built at Wellington Polytechnic in 1985. It was not the small kind most people start with, but ambitiously designed to hold a 14 x 11 inch (35.5 x 28 cm) paper negative. “I am looking forward to taking it out again…. This small coffee table sized pinhole camera” she joked. “I love the curved focal plane, the time exposure, the way that the clock seems to turn back as you make pinhole images - somehow capturing a life gone before…. The images seem to let the land breathe. I guess that’s the magic of the analogue experience in direct contrast to the enormous control and manipulation possible with digital cameras.”

I was not surprised to learn that she had caught the bug of pinhole photography while studying photography at the Wellington Polytechnic (now Massey University) when Kevin Capon and Tony Wincup, and William Main, a pioneering New Zealand photographic historian and collector of photographica, were teaching there.

The opening of the Camera Obscura was announced with justifiable civic pride in the 20 November 2020 press release from the Provincial Development Unit (PDU) of the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment which outlined the process and costs of building the Interactive Camera Obscura Sculpture:

“The PDU is proud to have played a part in the sculpture which will make a lasting contribution to Whangarei’s tourism and education landscape,” says Robert Pigou, Head of the Unit.

“The full cost of the sculpture was $991,000 and the Government invested $459,000 to enable the project to go ahead. There was huge community support from more than 500 supporters in Northland to raise the rest of the funding required. A group of 32 local construction companies were involved in the build, with many donating 100 per cent of their labour and materials and around 100 people worked on various stages of its construction.

“The sculpture, situated on Pohe Island, will add to the range of existing and planned attractions being created as part of the Hatea Loop Walkway located at the Whangarei Town Basin. It will be a catalyst to increase visitor numbers and advance the economic revitalisation of an area that has been largely under-developed,” Mr Pigou said.

When asked how she became interested in photography in the first place?, Diane Stoppard replied:

“I am the daughter of a farmer and teacher/artist. I grew up in Eltham, Taranaki, and got my first job at the local photography studio after school aged 14. Paul Connell at Connell Studios (started by his grandfather generations before) introduced me to the darkroom and I have never left it! I discovered photography and have remained obsessed by its possibilities.” She has worked as a professional photographer ever since, specialising in portraiture.

She continues to explore pinhole photography and is part of a world-wide group of specialists who have chosen this art form.  She worked as an assistant in the well-known studio of Charters and Guthrie in New Plymouth, and with John Crawford who took it over when Roy Charters (father of filmmaker Rodney Charters) and Rowan Guthrie retired.

After three years with John Crawford in New Plymouth, she travelled to New York, Montreal, and London, where she worked as a freelance assistant and magazine photographer. In London she worked as a photographic assistant in the iconic Holborn Studios, working for many of Europe’s top fashion and celebrity photographers.

When I asked what the plusses and minuses of working as a photographer’s assistant were, she said she became a very popular assistant overseas due to working in commercial photography for Charters, Guthrie and Crawford in New Plymouth. “These guys were masters and taught me well. I had a full understanding of photography and therefore was a very capable assistant as I was not learning the basics on the job but understood lighting, exposure, and camera management. I got to watch extremely skilled photographers working, I learnt the lighting tricks, but most importantly, how they interacted with their subjects. As I was eager to learn there was no downside - just a remarkable experience.”

“I needed to travel to extend myself photographically and get some ‘life’ experience. I took my camera everywhere and roamed the streets of New York, Montreal, and London. My time at Holborn Studios was life changing. With 12 studios, a restaurant, modelling agencies and photographers, the daily experience was remarkable. It was an interesting insight into the world of the famous but for me, the value was in the creative experience. Earning the trust of photographers and gathering new skills in the making of images. Many of the best experiences happened after hours. Once, when we got stuck for the evening with a big storm, I spent the night talking to a really interesting guy named John Lydon and it wasn’t until the next day that I realised he was Johnny Rotten from the Sex Pistols…. Some of my most memorable moments were playing poker and discussing books into the wee hours as we ran wild through the studios! I still keep in contact with Vincent McCartney who started it all.”

 Returning from London in 1991 she moved to Whangarei to be with her partner – he had a medical practice there – and finding no work opportunities for herself she started her own photography business. She is passionate about photography and continues to challenge herself with her craft.

In fact, fast on the heels of the opening of the Camera Obscura, she had an exhibition and a book launch to attend to: the publication of her book of pinhole photographs, The Light is Inconsolable, made in collaboration with the poet, Arthur Fairley, with an essay by Cathy Tuató Ross. Nine of her unusual pinhole photographs, some of which she combines with a digital overlay, were exhibited at Cross Street’s Hangar Gallery in Whangarei, in conjunction with the launch of the limited-edition book, which has virtually sold out. The exhibition ran from 26th November to 17 December 2020, and a portfolio of that work is featured on the PhotoForum website.

Asked about what kind of responses there have been from visitors to the Camera Obscura? She said that “The response has been extremely positive, with the public streaming through the obscura. I have met people who have spent over an hour inside, enjoying the view which becomes brighter as your eyes adapt, but also enjoying their interactions with other visitors and sharing their experience and what they saw. People are saying it is making them stop and really look at the view: the sky, the water, the bridge. I have enjoyed going in and each time a member of the public has explained to me how they think it works!”

Personally, because I am now living in China, I don’t know when, or even if, I’ll ever get see Whangarei’s elegant Camera Obscura for myself, not least because of the current travel and severe restrictions of movement needed to combat the Covid-19 pandemic.  But it is a bold and exciting public work that is likely to excite the curiosity of a new generation of photographers and followers. And as I found out more and more about it, memories flooded back from my early readings about the beginnings of photography, as told so well by the likes of Helmut and Alison Gernsheim, Beaumont Newhall, and HJP Arnold who wrote so knowledgably about the dogged and awe inspiring investigations of the visionary inventors, such as Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre and William Henry Fox Talbot, in particular.

They weren’t the only visionaries to obsess over the idea of being able to permanently capture the fleeting images that appeared upside down and back to front when a chink in the curtain of a darkened room projected what was going on in the daylight outside, of course. And it’s no wonder that Daguerre’s wife asked her doctor if her husband’s relentless obsession was a sign of madness. Just imagine, while standing inside the Camera Obscura, what our world would be like without the photography virus they gave us?

The last time I stood inside a camera obscura was when Neil Farrin blacked out one of the rooms of his Shadowcatcher’s Gallery around 2000, and projected the southeast end of Auckland’s Wellesley Street upside down. It turns out that it was Diane Stoppard and her co-curator, Ellie Smith who had made  it, as part of their ‘World Through a Pinhole’ exhibition at Shadowcatchers in 1998. “It was the corner room and you saw people walking on the street up the ceiling!”, she reminded me.

As Robert Pigou of the Provincial Development Unit said, “the Camera Obscura will create a teaching destination for all schools nationwide to study the optical phenomenon created by the sculpture which showcases the science of light”

My hope is that the Whangarei Camera Obscura will excite interest in the histories of photography and encourage more research into the rich and largely unexplored development of photography in New Zealand and the Pacific as well as bringing many more visitors and residents to Whangarei.

John B Turner, Beijing, January 2021.

[i] The bascule bridge is a moveable bridge with a counterweight that allows a span to rise to allow boats through. Northlanders know that.

 Web links of interest:

http://www.cameraobscura.nz/Home.aspx

https://www.rnz.co.nz/audio/player?audio_id=2018773791

Captions for readers on hand-held devices:

01_Diane Stoppard: Inside the new interactive Camera Obscura Sculpture the architect on the project, Felicity Christian, checks out the view of Te Matau ā Pohe bascule bridge in Whangarei, Northland, New Zealand.

02_Diane Stoppard: The view of the completed Camera Obscura from the north, October 2020.

03_Diane Stoppard:  On 5 August 2019, the sculptural steel exterior of the Camera Obscura was loaded onto a barge at Culham Engineering’s wharf and towed up te awa Hatea. Travelling through Te Matau ā Pohe bascule bridge in heavy fog, this maritime inspired sculpture silently arrived, appearing like a ship in the fog. The structure was successfully craned onto the foundations, fitting perfectly, by Culham Engineering, one of the many local companies who contributed to completing the sculpture.

04_Diane Stoppard:  A closeup of the Camera Obscura’s variable aperture mechanism.

05_Photographer not identified: Diane Stoppard with Karl (centre) and Arron of Culham Engineering, Whangarei, with the Camera Obscura lens and aperture control structure.

06_ Diane Stoppard: Kids puzzling over what they can see inside the Whangarei Camera Obscura, October 2020.

07_Diane Stoppard (14) at right with staff of Connell Studios, Taranaki.

08_Diane Stoppard assisting at Holborn Studios London, c.1990