In any history of cinema, the camera obscura is necessarily cited as one of the antecedents of the motion picture camera. But much like the upside-down image captured by the device, the obscura inverts the filmmaking process. Where movies are created from incrementally developing still photographs, the obscura composes a single image from movement through time.

The Print Center commissioned three artists to explore the temporal ramifications of the camera obscura. Beyond its historical import, Jacqueline van Rhyn, The Print Center's curator of prints and photographs, focused on the obscura "because it could be sculptural, an installation or room-size, giving the photographic process a monumental or at least interactive quality which is not commonly associated with photography."

Vera Lutter's large horizontal image of 30th Street Station, displayed in negative, appears to be an X-ray exposing the industrial musculature that powers the city unseen; Abelardo Morell transformed a gallery of the Art Museum into a large-scale obscura, projecting an image of the museum's facade onto a de Chirico painting; and Ann Hamilton's series of speakers at the Free Library and Rosenbach and church services views the fleeting presence of spectral humans against the permanence of structures and texts.