Camera with cross-sectioned lens

During the height of analogue photography companies such as Nikon would advertise their lenses using a cross section of the assembly in order to exhibit the complexity and number of lenses required to produce a perfect image. The use of cross sections in engineering (to explain how something works) goes back a long way and is a common device in museums to explain the working of a mechanism. I was always captivated by cross sections and wondered why someone would cut a perfectly good mechanism in half for the sake of a display. This technique influenced a number of my early works, in particular a work from 1983 a camera made with a bath tub, and after having made the work i needed to show or explain how it was produced so thereby cut the bath tub in half.

The work here addresses the issue directly by cutting the lens of the camera in half to understand if the lens would still function to produce an image of itself by utilising just the remaining part of the lens. Rather than use a cheap camera i decided to use a Nikon lens, the same type of camera used in the advertising of the 1970’s and 1980’s that had in fact inspired the idea for the work.

The resulting image is shown below using two mirrors to obtain the side view.

London 2014