DAY 128

PHOTOGRAPHIC CURIOSITIES

World’s Largest Camera

AIRCRAFT HANGARS AND CAMERA TRUCKS

If the category of “world’s smallest camera” involves cutting-edge technological innovations, the largest cameras are still grounded in continuity with time-tested techniques.

In June 2006, an entire aircraft hangar in El Toro, California, was transformed into an enormous pinhole camera, based on the same principle as the 14^th-century camera obscura (see page 9). Measuring 215 × 160 × 80 feet, the darkened hangar created a photograph on a muslin canvas three stories high and 10 stories wide; the image was developed in a “tray” the size of a swimming pool.¹

Shaun Irving lays claim to a very different sort of giant camera, however—one that he continues to use on a regular basis. Irving has modified a delivery truck to function as a camera large enough for the photographer to stand inside it. Having light-proofed the truck’s bed, Irving cut a hole in one wall of the vehicle large enough to fit a lens the size of a bathtub stopper. Massive sheets of photographic paper are hung from the opposite wall; when the lens is uncovered, an upside down image is projected onto the wall of the truck.

Irving has displayed the photos created by his “camera truck” in galleries across the world. He describes the images as “living, breathing pieces of work”; indeed, some of his photographs continue to develop even days after they have been hung on display in the gallery. —DJS