A Cultural Revolution

Shi Guorui (born 1964) shoots large-scale photographs with a camera obscura. In 2002, he transformed one of the Great Wall’s watchtowers into a pinhole camera and photographed the wall and surrounding landscape. In 2004, he shot Shanghai’s waterfront from a luxury hotel room made into a camera. Recently he has turned his attention to the American landscape, producing images of California for his current solo exhibition at the de Young Museum, in San Francisco. For the image shown here, he gained permission to photograph San Francisco from the chapel of the now-closed prison on Alcatraz Island.