Lucian Wester Description

Lucian wester

What

The object described is a photo installation at my graduation exhibition. The installation is contains a 6x6 medium format slide projector. The slide projector is standing on a small white base and is aimed ad a corner of the room in witch the installation stands. A book is placed beneath the front of the projector to give the projector an angle of about 45 degrees up instead off projecting horizontally. The projector projects a slide photo into a corner of the room. The projection covers two pieces of wall and a piece of the ceiling. The photograph that is projected is a photo of the exact same place or corner that the projector is projecting on. At first glance the projector seems only to project light. That’s because if the image fits exactly over the place you can’t see that there is a slide in the slide projector. But when the image is slightly out of position you can see that there is a photo projected. By closely looking at the projection you will notes that what at first glance was looking like a projector only projecting light is in fact projecting a image.

How

The slide photograph inside the slide projector must have the exact same scale of the wall where it is projected on, otherwise aberration will occur in some parts of the projection. Therefore the focal length of the projector must be the same as that of the camera where the picture is taken with. For this particular projection, with the 6x6 medium format projector, it was a focal length of 150 mm witch is a telephoto lens. The camera must be placed in the exact same spot where later on the projector will stand and has a same angle to match the projector.

Why

The bubble image that the projector creates is bound to the place where the photograph was taken and can therefore only been seen in context off its origin. The projector creates a photographic frame on the wall, the frame where all photography is concern with, but this time we also see everything that’s outside of the frame. The projection lets us think about photography, how it recreates our world, what it frames and what is outside of the frame. Susan Sontag describes in her essay bundle ‘On photography’ that a second world has been created existing only off photographic images and that this second world lets us see the first in different way. The layer of photographic light that illuminates the wall is somewhat like this second world that Sontag describes.