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Underground Camera Obscura Transforms Countryside into an Ever-Changing Painting

Collaborative artists Anna Heinrich and Leon Palmer have created a way to view a beautiful landscape as if you were standing inside a camera. To accomplish this, they’ve submerged a camera obscura—an optical device that consists of a room with a hole in one side—into the ground. What results is an immersive experience that reflects the outdoors into the interior space, mimicking how the image would enter a photographic device.

Heinrich and Palmer call their site-specific installation The Reveal, which features an 11.5-foot Weholite pipe embedded into the side of a hill in Hadleigh Country Park in Essex, England. Clad in a durable oak with an ash-lined interior, it has a lens fixed within the door to produce the image projection. When the door is shut tight, a vibrant outdoor scene is revealed on the inside of the back wall. The awe-inspiring view overlooks the land's rolling hills and resembles a constantly-moving painting.

The Reveal seats four or five people at a time and is accessible via a path in the park. Large enough to accommodate wheelchairs, it invites everyone to sit and experience the world in an unexpected way.

Anna Heinrich and Leon Palmer: Website
via [Colossal]

Sara Barnes

Sara Barnes is a Staff Editor at My Modern Met, Manager of My Modern Met Store, and co-host of the My Modern Met Top Artist Podcast. As an illustrator and writer living in Seattle, she chronicles illustration, embroidery, and beyond through her blog Brown Paper Bag and Instagram @brwnpaperbag. She wrote a book about embroidery artist Sarah K. Benning titled 'Embroidered Life' that was published by Chronicle Books in 2019. Sara is a graduate of the Maryland Institute College of Art. She earned her BFA in Illustration in 2008 and MFA in Illustration Practice in 2013.
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