Introduction to Chiaroscuro

Chiaroscuro is an ambitious art project that returns to the very roots of photography, harnessing the ancient principle of the camera obscura—"dark room"—to create breathtaking, immersive images on a monumental scale. We transform entire rooms into giant cameras, sealing windows and installing a tiny precision lens that projects the outside world, upside down and reversed, onto the opposite wall. Instead of film, we prepare large canvases—some as wide as three meters—with layers of liquid light-sensitive emulsion, painstakingly applied by hand in total darkness.

The exposure process is a patient meditation on light and time. Once the canvas is prepared and the room is sealed into perfect darkness, the lens is uncapped. For minutes or even hours, the outside scene—a bustling Florentine piazza, a quiet vineyard at dusk, a dramatic cloudscape—is slowly etched onto the canvas by nothing but light itself. The resulting image is a negative, with tones reversed, possessing an ethereal, painterly quality that is impossible to achieve with any digital or standard film process. Each piece is a unique, direct physical record of a specific place and moment in time, a literal tracing of light.

After exposure, the canvas is developed using traditional photographic chemicals in a giant trough, fixed, and washed. The final step is a labor-intensive process of toning and sealing to ensure the archival stability of the image for centuries. The scale and process mean that each work is a monumental undertaking, a performance piece in its own right, and an unrepeatable artifact. This project is a dialogue between the past and present, using a 500-year-old optical technique to create contemporary art that questions our relationship with reality and representation in the digital age.

Funding from this campaign is crucial for this logistically complex work. It will allow us to rent suitable spaces for the camera obscuras, purchase large volumes of chemicals and premium canvases, and construct the custom equipment needed to handle and process these massive, sensitive works. Supporting Chiaroscuro means supporting a radical and beautiful slow-art movement.

Our Mission

Our mission is to create profound, large-scale art using the purest form of photography, reminding viewers of the magic and physicality of image-making in an increasingly virtual world.

Key Features

Each artwork is a unique, camera-less photograph created directly on canvas using room-sized camera obscuras and hand-applied emulsion, resulting in a one-of-a-kind negative image.

What Makes Our Project Unique

We are one of the very few studios in the world working at this scale with the camera obscura technique. Our location in Florence, the birthplace of the Renaissance, provides a deeply symbolic and inspiring backdrop for this work.

• Each piece is a site-specific performance and artifact combined.
• The process is entirely analog and chemical, with no digital manipulation.
• The scale creates an immersive, awe-inspiring viewing experience.

Exclusive Rewards for Backers

• $10 – A digital scan of a test strip from a session.
• $20 – A signed postcard of a completed Chiaroscuro work.
• $30 – An 8x10" digital negative print from a project session.
• $50 – A behind-the-scenes video documentary of the process.
• $100 – A small, handmade camera obscura print on paper.
• $250 – A commissioned pinhole photograph made with a custom camera.

Meet our team

We are a collaborative duo: a master photographer specializing in alternative processes and a chemical engineer, both dedicated to pushing the boundaries of analog image-making.

Join Us

Become a patron of a vanishing art form. Help us capture the light of Italy in the most direct way possible and create monumental works of art that can never be replicated.