Ethan Jackson and Camera Obscura

This past Wednesday I went to Inova Gallery, which is apart of the UWM Peck School of the Arts, to witness Ethan Jackson’s installation of Panopticon I. From my first walk towards the buildings east entrance I was greeted by Carl Bogner who alerted me that we were, at this very moment, apart of the camera obscura. I entered the building and turned into the large drapes that we hanging from the ceiling. When I entered immediately to my left was the camera obscura. When I stood there against the window watching this live presentation of the outside world I was thinking this was super cool. The scene that we witnessed was of the road directly outside from us. We could see many buildings that were across the street in a hazed form of their color. The weather outside was very cloudy so it allowed the scene presented on the wall to have a cool haze brought on by tints of blues and hints of grays. I saw a bag that was stuck in a tree directly across the street and thought at first of a tell-tale sign of the decay of Milwaukee’s beautiful city, then I realized that watching the bag in the tree being blown but never leaving gave the scene a reality that could have been lost if there was nothing imperfect on the wall being presented before us. After standing there for a little while I began to think how this made me feel very voyeuristic, in a sense, because people walking by and driving by had no idea they were being watched. I was my very own L. B. Jefferies from Rear Window. I was watching everything going on outside from me and no one had a clue they were being watched. I envisioned seeing a murder in the far distance of the camera obscura’s reach. Back to reality, I began to think how this very amazing feat before me was simply by bending light. I thought about the complexity of the human eye and the simplicity of the source being the sun. I wonder if people hundreds of years ago who developed this way of bending the light to project an image realized how groundbreaking this discovery was. Man I love cameras.