Mia/Methods 23.1.2019

I wish to make a full text on my focal camera project (from notes written during the process of making - on the wiki in section Focal camera)

With the hand-made photo camera I explore the relation between drawing and photography and seeming difference between objectivity and subjectivity of the image. Works made with this camera are actually photographs that merge with drawings directly in the process of exposing the negative. It is a collage that happens in the machine itself. Right at the spot where I want to photograph, I draw a composition onto a plastic foil, slide it in the camera and take a picture. Thus, we get a negative which combines a scene from my surroundings with a drawing made at that very place. Creative process of making is therefore intertwined with the chance principle. In terms of presentation, I find it important that apart from the photographs, the camera as an object is on display as well. It tells the viewer about the process of making the pictures and is therefore a key step to the outcome. On one side, the project includes planning and making of the tool to produce images and on the other, it encompasses those images as an outcome. DIY approach is a response to an extremely fast development of photographic technology, that actually reveals as problematic. Photographic cameras are becoming exceedingly complicated and thus non-transparent tool. In contrast to that, the structure of Risbaparat is streamlined, keeping its operation clear and explicable. Nevertheless, it offers effects and characteristics I could never achieve with serially manufactured equipment.