The camera obscura
The centrepiece of Solar Cinema is a camera obscura - Latin for 'dark room'. It takes the form of a marquee-style tent, measuring 6m x 3m (footprint) x 3m (height). Being portable, it can be moved to different locations during the duration of the project. And being a camera, as we understand the phrase today, it will project a live-action moving projection.
    The screen inside the tent can be viewed either from behind or in front. Instead of ‘freezing’ the image like a conventional camera does to take photographs or a sequence of stills, the projection ‘frames’ that part of the park with the screen .The different type of looking that it facilitates can be both an experience of the moment and an experience captured.

Bringing history into the present
Famously used by painters such as Vermeer and Canaletto to depict the world with a reality previously not seen, the camera obscura made possible a greater realism than art had so far been possible. As a drawing tool its accuracy deepened the illusion on which representational art depends for its effect.
    The irony in this story is that, once it was developed in the nineteenth century as a reliable image-making instrument, the camera supplanted pictorial illusion by capturing the material reality of what the eye saw.

He has also applied the same technique to a busy stretch of motorway and to a suburban street at night. Using a three-hour exposure, he captured this quite haunting image. The colours appear not-quite natural, and the building acquires a statuesque quality. Presented with this record made over an expanse of time – instead of the usual, instantaneous impression left by a modern camera’s fast shutter speed – we notice features of the house that are usually neglected.
   These images also captured traces in the night sky. But they were not the vapour trails of aeroplanes but the tracks made by stars.

Martin’s approach is informed by a concern for the process of photography as well as its product. His projects have begun to take the form of installations in public locations that show how photography works. By harking back to early photographic techniques and the era of its discovery he raises questions about the aesthetics of the medium in the new century.
    One product of these installations has been to recapture the magic of photography. His interest in the science of making images has led him to the origins of the medium, and to the word itself. Photography is ultimately derived from two Greek words: ph_tos meaning light and -graphos which alludes to writing and writers. Thus, our word signifies ‘written in light’.
    In 2003 Martin transformed a shed into a ‘light-writer’, an interior space through which light from outside would pass through the darkened room to the end wall covered in a huge sheet of sensitised paper. The light was directed through a lens, the piece of glass that concentrates light-rays so that they can be dispersed to make a negative image.

Shed was set up in Morden Hall Park by the River Wandle in Colliers Wood. It grew out of a project the year before in Whitehaven, Cumbria. On that occasion Martin experimented with a watchtower that surveyed the port. (Whitehaven had been a military target of the rebel Americans in the 1770s.)
   The interior was made into a camera and a series of panoramic views made by channelling light on to a photo-sensitive surface. Positive prints capturing a remarkable amount of detail were made from the negatives and displayed to local townspeople. For more information go to http://www.martinnewth.com/