We Are Projectors
FRANCE
We Are Projectors is an initiative founded by artist Clément Briend around the practice of photographic projection. At the intersection of photography and urban art, the project explores how a projected image can temporarily transform a space, a building or a landscape. Through mobile and autonomous devices, We Are Projectors approaches public space as a potential screen and develops a collective, experimental and engaged practice of image-making.
• SERIES •
Camera Obscura
When we open our eyes, an image of the outside world is projected onto each of our retinas. The installation you are looking at is a camera obscura. On a different scale, it reproduces the optical phenomenon that takes place inside our eyes.
By darkening a room and allowing light to enter only through a converging lens, light rays from the outside world are focused and form an image of the surrounding landscape on the opposite surface. This image has three essential characteristics : it is luminous, inverted and in perspective. It is a true optical projection of the outside world.
This same principle lies at the origin of our photographic cameras and film cameras. Like the eye, they do not directly « capture » the world : they first form an image projected onto a light-sensitive surface — the retina in the eye, and film or a sensor in a camera. Photography and vision therefore share the same origin: the projection of the world’s light onto a surface.