Peepshow

This is a short post as I am away at the moment, but this is a model of Samuel Van Hoogstraten’s peep show (from the National Gallery, London) with the doors removed so that you look through it into my office. The photograph is taken with a camera I built to take the ideal picture to resolve the anamorphic view. The camera is built with a lot of shift to achieve this and to fill the frame. In the peep show there is a disturbance between pictorial and material space and this is played on with a (real) light coming through the doors that lands on the ceiling of the box. The furthest part of the ceiling of the box pictorially represents the wall of the room, so the light appears to land on the inside surface of the exterior wall it comes through. More paradoxical shadows. As we implicitly believe light, this disturbance takes a moment or two to register.

The unfolded view of the peepshow shows the anamorphic distortions of the room to get it to make sense when folded into a box. The two peep holes can be seen at either end.

There are some views looking back the other way that I will dig out.