In My Round Eye

In our round eyes the world maintains its true shape. But pictures are flat. This is one of the great dilemmas of photography, which we mostly avoid by letting the picture show a very small cutout of all we see. We use so called normal lenses that give a feeling of perspecitve resembling that of the eye, but in doing so, we miss the enormous angle the eye covers, some 180°.

If you try to picture an angle that wide the image must then be round. But the paper is flat, and the lines away from the centre of the image will bend. If you point the camera slightly downward, the horizon bends. All of a sudden the world becomes small and cozy, like a ball you can hold in your hand or a cave you can hide inside.

The pictures in this series were taken with the camera to the right, a common 35mm SLR with a normal lens and a "magic eye" worth a couple of dollars attached in front of the lens.