Essex, 10.10.24
Today is World Mental Health Day. We invited the Learning Team from @gainsboroughshouse in Sudbury, Suffolk to bring a mobile Camera Obscura into Wethersfield Asylum Centre as part of our ongoing effort to offer new creative experiences to the men housed there which might in turn enhance their wellbeing.
A predecessor to modern photography, this centuries-old contraption has been adapted by the Learning Team into a nomadic camera obscura. This consists of a tent with a hole in the top into which is mounted a mirror and lens, light projected onto a round table surface inside, where the scene from outside is reproduced, inverted and reversed, with colour and perspective able to be preserved.
Over the afternoon, we built small box cameras at the table, moving between inside the group space and the tent outside where 30 men ventured in small groups, several young men excited to show their friends. One said “it’s like magic”, another, “it gave me a good feeling”, another, “it’s beautiful”.
The camera obscura acted as a sort of natural ground for a few security guards who also ventured inside the tent. Here there could be joint attention and shared moments of curiosity and wonder. Usually watching the men in their role, here they could look at something else together - the grim fences and surfaces inside the camp transformed fleetingly - but also caught on camera phones in their new changed beauty.
We know that being able to look at something in a different way can shift a person’s mood.
Words by Miriam Usiskin, Bobby Lloyd, Katie Miller & Thomas Etheridge.
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