SUSANNA CRUM

With cyanotype, lithography, woodcut, and silkscreen, A Collecting Place featured multilayered images that explore the past and present of Edinburgh's camera obscura attraction, which for more than 150 years has projected a 360-degree, live view of the city within a dark chamber. With its movable lens and glowing screen, the camera obscura continues to facilitate observation, contemplation, and playful (and illusory) manipulation of landscape, in a way that feels at once futuristic and ancient, public and private. When city planner and sociologist Patrick Geddes managed the space in the late 19th- and early 20th centuries, the camera obscura became a tool with which visitors accessed his philosophy of thinking globally to act locally.

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Many thanks to Edinburgh Printmakers for being such a wonderful place to produce much of this work, as well as the Camera Obscura and World of Illusions, Riddle's Court, Edinburgh, and Scottish Historic Buildings Trust for helping me with the research for this project.