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Drawing with a Camera – Panoramic Images on Close and Broad Circles

Drawing with a Camera – Panoramic Images on Close and Broad Circles
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    • Drawing with a Camera – Panoramic Images on Close and Broad Circles
    • Rajzolás kamerával, külső, belső panoráma
  • 1977
  • 13 b&w photographs mounted on cardboard
  • 70 × 100 cm
In this action, Dóra Maurer gave a new function to her much used camera. She employed it as a kind of drawing tool, with which she could depict and delineate the surrounding reality. However, the series of photographs reveal not only the paradoxes of this operation, but also of panoramic depiction per se, since she combined a wide outdoor panoramic view with a narrow indoor one. In actual fact, the artist positioned her camera at a balcony door and took thirteen pictures, while rotating it in a whole circle. Moreover, the photographs partly repeat each other, as every picture contains a quarter of the former one. Since the artist did not change the camera’s settings, there are extreme differences in distance and sharpness on some of the photographs. Consequently, the whole series astutely demonstrates the medial limits of photography as a means to consider the objective representation of reality, through a simple “drawing exercise” with the camera. S.H.