Boza building

The city as an urban disaster is the core of the project Lima 01 by Philippe Gruenberg and Pablo Hare, carried out in abandoned buildings in the historic center of this city. Walling up windows of the premises and leaving only a small opening, both photographers converted these constructions into camera obscura, that project the scenes happening in the exterior into the interior. It is about the basic principle that structures photography since its origins. By fixing these projected images, the final work represents a subtle commentary about urban deterioration and the complex statute of public and private spaces of the city. But this also inverts the position of the photographer who no longer looks through the window of the camera but rather captures an image projected from the window, With this conceptual turn-about, Gruenberg and Hare distance themselves from traditional pictorial referents, to reclaim the critical potential and the visual resources of photography. (NM)