Montserrat de Pablo

Montserrat de Pablo is Associate Professor the Faculty of Fine Arts in Cuenca at the University of Castilla-la Mancha, Spain. She received her BA in Fine Arts from the Complutense University in Madrid (1992), and her PhD in Fine Arts from the Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha (2014). She wrote her doctoral dissertation on “The History of the Camera Obscura as a Prehistory of Photography” (2014). She has been a regular visiting scholar at the Institute since 2013.

Montserrat’s work surveys the camera obscura’s evolution in the Western world. She has created a timeline to provide a global overview of the history of the camera obscura and, as her work is also based on the selection and compilation of documentary sources, she has also produced a database with related illustrations. She is currently working on an online presentation of this timeline and database.

In 2015, Montserrat was Artist-in-Residence at the Institute. She explored the possibilities of the camera obscura and, to understand its use, worked with the historical camera held at the Institute. Using the camera obscura, she created a series of drawings and photographs which formed part of the exhibition “On the camera obscura. The obsession to capture images” at the MPIWG in 2015 (a selection of portraits of staff and scholars made with the camera obscura is still exhibited in its hallway and the camera obscura timeline and database in the Library). A related exhibition, “Montserrat de Pablo. Cámara Oscura: Work in Progress” was shown at the University of Castilla-La Mancha in Cuenca (January 2015) and Ciudad Real (May 2015), Spain. The MPIWG exhibition was shown at the Spanish Embassy in Berlin in fall 2016.

A further project, “In-Camera-Out,” with Antonio Becchi, builds on her work with the camera obscura. The long-term aim of this project is to create a large portrait gallery of members of the Institute and its visiting scholars. In connection with this project, a short film, dedicated to the people who have worked at or been involved with the Institute since its foundation, was presented at the institute, “Spring 1994” (2019).