Camera Box photography (in Colombia called “fotoagüitas”) was a practice widely used and very common in countries of Latin America, particularly around the period 1900-1970. This type of photography is worked with a “laboratory-camera”, which is a small evolution from the camera obscura since it is a dark and hermetic box with a lens and inside there is a compartment where the photography places the photographic paper.

In such a way, at the moment of taking a photo, the photographer introduces his hands inside the box, through rubber sleeves stick to the camera to avoid light from entering, he takes out the photographic paper from the inner compartment in the back of the camera, and takes off the lens to take the picture during a number of seconds which he is counting. (That is the reason why in Chile and Spain they are called “minuters”)

Once the photographic paper is exposed, inside the same box, the photographer has two small trays with revealing liquid for the paper and universal fixer, and he puts within the trays the negative he just exposed. Then he takes out the negative, he throws it into a bucket with water outside the camera (that explains the name “Fotoagüitas”, or “Water-photos”), in order to wash the photographic paper.

With this procedure what the photographer obtains is negative in photographic paper. To obtain the positive, what he does is to place the negative near the camera and change the lens for a lens-magnifier and then follows the same procedure, taking a photo of the negative. By revealing it, fixing it and washing it, he obtains the photographic positive. 

In the "Fotoagüitas Project: A homage to Don Miguel Muñoz, the last living photographer”, he who has the longest experience in this technique close to extinction, has been invited to take pictures at the “V Biennial of Professors” in Javeriana University.

The Project of this Biennial aims to highlight the image and the importance of this type of photographers almost “magic” at a moment where the digital techniques and the immediateness of results has limited analogous photographic practices only to what is considered artistic and crafts. The project also wants to think the meaning of the Campus’s plazas as merely academic places, and grant them a new significance, a new register and a new memory.

Finally, as part of the memory of the project, a mural will be created with all the negatives taken by don Miguel.

“The photographer lambe-lambe (lick-lick) is a professional in way to extinction. He practices an activity that was overcome by technological easiness, and the haste imposed by the time of new speeds. To remember him in this work has a flavor of trying to recover images and histories that today provide with an infinite number of esthetic, cultural and social data. And just one picture has that power of bringing to the surface a piece of that unbelievable labyrinth which is a difficult constructive of the collective memory” (Taken from João Emilio Gerodetti, Carlos Cornejo. “Lembrancas de São Paulo”, Solaris Edções Culturais, São Paulo, 2003.)