INTERIOR / EXTERIOR is a project which started in 1996.
By using a special of camera obscura technique
I can capture into the same image with one long exposure
both person, room and the reflection of external landscape. First I just have to transform the room into camera obscura and then photograph there by using normal lens camera and long exposures.
Until now I have been working with this method in Finland,
Norway, Italy, Estonia and France.
At the moment Interior/Exterior series has 70 colour prints, the sizes of them are from 35 x 45 cm to 150 x 185 cm.
The project continues and takes new forms.
Usually I also create into the exhibition place a unique camera obscura with many lenses
together with Petri Nuutinen to show the fascinating light phenomenon on which these images are based.
In 2002 came out my second photobook CAMERA OBSCURA interior/exterior.
Camera obscura (lat. dark room) is a phenomenon, that happens
when light is passing through a hole or a lens into a dark space
where it makes an upside-down image of the view outside.
Scientists, artists and philosophers have used this
phenomenon for centuries in their work.
Also our eyes and all kind of cameras
are based on it.
* * *
INSIDE A CAMERA OBSCURA - AND IN PERSONAL PLACE
by Janne Seppänen
professor of visual culture
University of Art and Design in Helsinki
When Marja Pirilä makes a camera obscura, a darkened room, out of someone´s flat,
with the outside world projected upside down on its walls, she is playing with an invention
that is thousands of years old. The people in her pictures are situated in their
own personal spaces, within four walls.
Windows open from these spaces onto the outside world. The window is the boundary between
the private and the public, between the personal and the commonly shared, and - if you like -
between psyche and culture.
In them, the external space leaks with irresistibile force into the interior, into the persona, domain.
The window is no longer a peephole, but becomes a two-way portal between inside and outside.
This eats away at consept of human beings for whom their own interiority alone suffices,
and who view the world without the world getting to them.
Pirilä´s pictures attest to the fact that the landscape seen from the window is not outside, but within us.
Here, we are at the centre of formation of identity, at the point where the individual´s mental reality
meets cultural narratives.
The pictures also live up to the magical role of camera obscura. When the walls of room
are papered with flickering figures, this has bewildering effect. The pictures are upside-down, and it is sometimes hard to decipher them. They drip with indeterminacy.
This constantyly calls into the question the camera-obscura tradition that understands it
as an instrument for gathering accurate information. Perhaps this magicality also illustrates
the postmodern individual´s identity, which is made up of multiple ingredients
and is even harder to define than before.