Photographing the Urban Module (12 sessions)
University of Stirling International Studies Summer program
2010-2016

Students were led through a series of lectures and workshops by Sylvia in order to learn how to build a camera obscura and create a darkroom enlarger from the same unit.

The student assignment was three-fold. Firstly to construct a camera by using a provided lens, found cardboard boxes, and a plastic screen.
Secondly students were invited to used their camera obscura and draw the scene projected on its screen. Student were further encouraged to digitally record from the camera obscura projection screen a series of landscape images.

As part of the learning about the camera obscura and its evolution into a fully functional camera the students made their camera box light tight so it could be used as a pinhole camera for the production of a photographic paper negative. Lastly students were guided how to reverse engineer their paper camera into a photo enlarger.

As a follow-up assignment student groups were also tasked with producing a series of hand-made filters to learn first hand about past imaging techniques used by Pictorialists, for example.