Solid Glass Sea

The solid glass series is something where I’m exploring the limitations and failures of this great piece of technology. It’s a solid glass catadioptric lens that the CIA and FBI used to spy because it was super compact.

At the time, the lenses like a 500-600 millimeter lens would be so long that it was like if you’d point it out a hotel window, it would look like a shotgun and people could recognize it really easily.

But these new catadioptic lenses, they were wide and solid, and they were accurate to a degree. There was a lot of engineering compromises made to make this lens, and I wanted to explore that.

With very long zoom lenses, things become compressed, and with these catadioptic lenses the light also becomes compressed and the depth of field is set, so there’s only a limited range that’s actually in focus at any given time, so it creates this really interesting effect that’s always just barely in control.

And I again I wanted to take mundane objects and just photograph them and see what comes out. That’s what I did there.