Our eyes begin with an upside down world, we process the data to turn it right side up.   It's critical to confront our own processing to understand our understanding of the world.  

In 1976 I turned my 4th-floor Sever Hall studio in Harvard Yard into a room-sized Camera Obscura and inverted Memorial Church Steeple. I did this in broad daylight without smoke and mirrors, lenses or optics.   I hung a blackout shade and cut a small hole in the shade.   The simplicity was essential to the success of the installation; no one could hide behind a lack of scientific knowledge. It was simply a dark room with a small hole that inverted the image, like our eyes.

In 1978, I was an intern at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies. The offices occupied the 20th and 21st floors on 8 W. 40th Street, overlooking Bryant Park to the north and offering a clear view of the Empire State Building to the south.

I installed another room-sized Camera Obscura, this time of the Empire State Building. It was a corridor, a small chambor between two rooms that had been partitioned once for a recording studio, that I converted into a small room. This time, painting the windows black, I made the "lens" by scraping a small window in the paint with my fingernail. It was conceptually simple: I constricted the view to the outside in order to project it inside and upside down.

Both rooms became destinations for the curious; a place to contemplate perception and the clouds going by. The Empire State Building was illuminated at night making for a slower experience requiring a bit of faith; to see the image it was necessary to enter the dark chamber and wait the five to ten minutes required for one's eyes to adjust. The reward was wash of color in the night sky.

I made this image from the same vantage point never once dreaming that the World Trade Center would come down. Wyatt Landesman of Quantity Postcards published it in 1978.