Midnight Sun Camera Obscura Festival,
an Introduction
Donald Lawrence
T
he initial idea of this event was formed over a decade ago, in 2004. At the time, Mike Yuhasz,
Coordinator of Dawson City’s ODD Gallery, programmed an exhibition of my Underwater
Pinhole Photography Project that coincided with a 48 Hour Pinhole Photography Workshop
led by Mario Villeneuve, and Byron Shandler and John Steins’ construction of the town’s permanent
camera obscura on the waterfront. A level of enthusiasm among the local community around these
combined events led several of us, including workshop participant Bob Jickling, to envision a future
event: the Midnight Camera Obscura Festival.
The Festival’s participants, comprised of artists, scholars, curators, student research assistants
and community partners, is funded through an Insight grant of the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), with further funding from the Canada Council for the Arts.
The collective group of artists/researchers is using the camera obscura as a focal point to explore
a number of interrelated research questions around: the meeting places of art and science,
relationships between learning and play, and the opportunities afforded by situating art-making
activities in wilderness, remote and Northern settings. The remoteness and surrounding wilderness
of Dawson City and its environs will elicit such a fluid play between study, creation and reflection,
through exhibitions, artists’ off-site projects and a range of lectures and presentations. Participating
researchers Dr. Sven Dupré and Dr. Petran Kockelkoren suggest that learning and play may go handin-hand and that participatory forms, such as cameras obscura and like-minded constructions, may
disrupt habituated manners of perception in order to give pause for thought and open the way for
new understandings to emerge. While Dupré’s opening lecture provides an historical context for such
interests Kockelkoren will engage the group’s artists in a discussion around their projects and ѡ