Tony Bingham

Birmingham, Alabama

Ancestral Light & Sounds — Camera Obscura

From a photo series - Ancestral Light Capture: Camera Obscura 

“light rays entering the eye and light rays entering the glass globe placed inside a small camera obscura”

- Codex Atlanticus, folio 337, ca 1500, Leonardo Da Vinci.

 I found fragments of glass bottles and glass shards, through wanderings in the back/black spaces of buildings along the town square in rural Marion, Alabama and in the ruins of the Smithfield neighborhood, a community in Birmingham that was partially erased through highway construction.

 On the inside of my camera obscura, were arraigned the broken fragments and vessels to serve as lenses, for directing light and image onto film. The light capture evokes memories of the black folks who last touched those bits of glass. And through the words found on a sharecropper’s letter, worked up and layered in the camera, given a connection to a distant past. 

“I select cast off materials to create my cameras, and with them, construct an imagery that interprets the humanity of a cast off people.”

— A Second of Your Time" Prospect 1.5 Biennial 2010, New Orleans, Gallery guide, Tony M. Bingham