Together Charles Schwartz and Bill Westheimer are exploring the city of New York on the upper east side of Manhattan using a Camera Obscura. These pictures reveal the city through the unique viewpoint of the camera obscura and record the images digitally. The Camera Obscura's location is fixed, yet it provides an ever changing view of the city's activities, architecture and landscape. The images use a pre-photographic technology combined with post-photographic digital capture to create a timeless view of New York. The digital camera instantly captures the ephemeral projections in a clear crisp reality that transports the viewer into other worlds.
The work has four main themes:
Survey: The landscape and architecture
of New York as seen from the Camera Obscura
Surveillance: The Camera Obscura captures the activities and lives of unsuspecting New Yorkers in the course of their daily lives revealing insights into the humanity of the city.
Surface: The two dimensional Camera Obscura images are projected onto objects and bodies contrasting the exterior scenes with unlikely yet related three dimensional shapes
Sun: Observations using the Camera Obscura of the sun and its effects on objects.
The digital captures are printed as pigmented inkjet prints on acid-free fine art paper in sizes up to 40”x60”
Charles Schwartz has been involved with photography and the photographic community for over thirty years, as a photographer, a collector, and as a dealer.
Bill Westheimer has been a photographer since the mid 1960's. His work has been shown in galleries around the country and is included in numerous private collections.
