Did you know that you can take pictures on pastries, fruit or dishes? That a camera is a simple thing in principle? That you can make one yourself at home?

Anežka learned to make a camera obscura as a child. She returned to it as an adult when she started travelling after high school – she wanted to capture her travels not only with a brush on paper, but also photographically. She soon traded her SLR for a bean can with a tiny hole in it. This is how her first foreign photographs were taken – on a homemade camera obscura. Her technological experimentation did not end there, on the contrary – the author fell in love with this method and continued with it on further trips. As she says: “I enjoyed the photos that came out of the pinhole chamber. Their slight blurriness, blind composing and long exposures created sometimes perfectly imperfect atmospheric images.” Her other cameras were made from objects that were typical of the destination: a camera made from a banana peel on the island of Saint Lucia, another camera from an Algerian baguette, or an Italian espresso cup. The resulting photographic abstractions are authentic, immediate, a little mysterious, sometimes flawed, but for the artist herself, immensely valuable. They do not try to be technically perfect, they are their own.

Anežka Straková (b. 1995) is a graduate of DAMU and today she works with film architecture, painting and analogue photography – including the production of her own cameras.