Light in a Dark Box, 2023
Archival inkjet prints on Hahnemuhle rice paper
Slemmons camera collection
The Kodak Brownie Target Six-20 was a popular box camera manufactured between 1946 and 1952. It is a very simple device, with a fixed shutter speed and two aperture options, f16 and f22, essentially for “bright” and “very bright” conditions. The camera has a fixed-focus lens that requires subjects to be at a distance of at least eight feet.
I was drawn to the camera for its simplicity as well as its popularity. It epitomizes the basic elements of analogue photography—capturing light in a dark box—and it produces the most common photographic form, the snapshot.
I photographed my parents with the Kodak Brownie Target Six-20, using a device that they were photographed with in their early years. Scanning the medium-format negatives, I then made large inkjet prints in an effort to monumentalize these reflections of light caught in a small dark box.
Shawn Michelle Smith is an artist, scholar, writer, and educator based in Chicago, Illinois. Her work is about photography – what it is, what it means, what it does. She is interested in the history of photography and the ways photographs are invested with cultural significance. She has published seven books, including the award-winning titles At the Edge of Sight: Photography and the Unseen (2013) and Photographic Returns: Racial Justice and the Time of Photography (2020). She is a professor of Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and she has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, among others. Her artwork has been exhibited nationally.