World Siberian Pictorial Biennale and Gallery present the international photo project of pinhole photography "OBSCURA".

The OBSCURA exhibition presents 40 photographs made by 20 authors from such countries as: France, Russia, Italy, the United States of America, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Germany, Spain, Sweden. All works are united by the fact that they were made by pinhole cameras - many of which were made by the authors themselves.

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A pinhole camera, pinhole camera, stenoper or simply pinhole is a photographic camera without lenses, where a small hole is used as the lens. We find the earliest mention of the obscura principle in the "Problems" attributed to Aristotle (about 350 BC) - a kind of catalog of unresolved issues at that time.

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Pinhole photography became popular in the 1890s. Cameras were sold in Europe, the USA and Japan, special kits for taking and printing photographs were produced, societies were created, and books were published. In the sixties of the last century, due to the efforts of enthusiasts in Western Europe, a revival of interest in photography without lenses began. The hobby captures an ever wider circle of photographers and in the seventies reaches the United States of America, from where later, in the last decade of the twentieth century, it comes to Russia.

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All ingenious is simple. Photography is not a megapixel matrix and ultra-fast optics. Photography is a sense of life, philosophy, human soul. And nothing is needed to express feelings - only light.