When I went to see Richard Torchia's exhibition, "Sun Pictures and Other Broken Images," I first ducked under a heavy gray curtain and climbed the stairs to the unlighted second-floor galleries. The two rooms seemed vast and unfamiliar in the dark.

Looking into the back gallery, I saw a pale image of twisted tree branches and a little piece of a brick wall projected upside-down on a hanging scrim. The projected images emitted a silvery light into the room like moonlight. Watching the piece, Courtyard Views (facing south; to be traced at some later date), I noticed the branches moving slightly in the wind and the sky change from milky clouds to bits of blue sky. A highlight in the drama occurred when a helicopter, with corresponding real-life sound effects, flew through the center of the projected image. Latimer Street Windows (facing north; to be counted, with help from a lens), installed directly on the facade in the opposite gallery, has three groups of images on frosted glass panels, each with a different miniature view of the surrounding street and buildings. As I watched, a banner suddenly flared out dramatically and then disappeared. Torchia, a Philadelphia artist, produced all of these spontaneous images using the hidden technology of the camera obscura.

The magic of the camera obscura was first studied thousands of years ago by the Chinese philosopher Mo-Ti in fifth century B.C. and, a few centuries later, by Greek and Islamic scholars. The optical phenomenon is created when a pinhole lets a tiny bit of light into a very dark space resulting in a projected upside-down image of the scene outside—as commonly seen when viewing a solar eclipse. By the 16th century, lenses and mirrors were employed to improve the quality of the image. In the 19th century the device developed along two paths: one leading to the camera obscura room and the other to early photography. Torchia's work, for the past 15 years, has involved camera obscura rooms that focus our attention on the natural and urban environment. The work in this exhibition is a continuation of that exploration, but recently he's become fascinated by the early 19th-century photographs of William Henry Fox Talbot, Joseph Niépce and Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre. (The show's title refers to the term heliography, or sun writing, coined by Niépce; the English translation, "sun pictures," was employed by Talbot.) Torchia was particularly inspired by the ordinary, pragmatic subjects of their early photographs of unaffected studio interiors, windows and nearby buildings.

When Torchia began planning the site-specific pieces for the exhibition, he thoroughly investigated all of the Print Center's interior and exterior spaces. He cleaned all the windows, and then studied the views, the trees, the sky, the courtyard behind the center and the street out front. He says, "Anyone who has been to the Print Center might remember the seven front windows, which were covered not long ago by false walls. You might also remember the beautiful cast-iron balustrade in the center." He used clamp lights to focus our attention on details such as ironwork, moldings and mullions. A globe-shaped piece of exterior ironwork that appears as a silhouette during the day slowly transforms in the evening to a bright golden color. Torchia expressed regret that the average viewer would be unable to observe the subtle changes in the color of the globe and other transformations in the images over a longer period of time. Still, he's enjoyed making provisions for other inevitable atmospheric effects. When the sun goes down the back gallery is completely dark, so another piece, titled Choir, 2005, is brought out. It's a projector for a single candle—a steel cage on wheels covered with black foil pierced with a thousand pinholes—that projects a thousand tiny "broken images" of flames on the screen and around the room.

All of the work in the exhibition shares visual effects with photography, cinema and video, but it exists in real time. Torchia says, "Now that photography as we knew it is on the wane … I believe the camera obscura has new things to tell us not only about what photography might be or was, but about perception and the world itself." Perhaps it's no coincidence that the first paper negative produced by Talbot for the photograph Latticed Window (with the camera obscura), of his home, Lacock Abbey, bore this handwritten inscription: "When first made, the squares of glass, about 200 in number, could be counted, with help of a lens." This installation inspires a similar attentiveness to the precise details of the real world.

Sun Pictures and Other Broken Images: Richard Torchia Through March 4, The Print Center, 1614 Latimer St., 215-735-6090

"Sun Pictures" precedes another exhibition at The Print Center, in the fall of 2006, of work by Abelardo Morell, Vera Lutter and Ann Hamilton, three artists who innovatively use the camera obscura to produce photographs.