An abandoned concrete building in the heart of Beirut, Lebanon (known as The Egg) has been everything from a movie theater to a bomb shelter to a water tank, but this intervention would fill the gaps in its bullet-ridden shell with a series of lenses, reflecting images of the city into its cavernous void.

After a series of unsuccessful attempts to repurpose or restore the structure, architect and photographer Anthony Saroufim came up with an idea to give it a powerful temporary purpose, in part to tell the harrowing history of this war-torn city. His proposal is illustrated in the haunting brown-scale images throughout this article.

Scaffolding on the exterior would allow visitors to approach, walk up and around the egg, with circulation routes designed around gaps in the facade as well as civic features and landmarks to be reflected from outside.

The Egg was commissioned 1965 and designed by the Lebanese architect Joseph Philippe Karam, but was intended to be part of a larger downtown tower complex: the Beirut City Center (original design and historical context images shown above not by Saroufim). It was to be surrounded with a mixed-use program malls and office spaces, a small piece of a large puzzle. Indeed, now known variously as The Egg or The Dome, the structure was never officially given a proper name independent of the larger development.

When civil war broke out a decade later, the plans were put on hold and many of the structures in the complex outside The Egg were destroyed in the conflict, partially or entirely. In the decades that followed, the structure was reused in a variety of ways, but always remained a large and monolithic work, much grander in scale relative to its surroundings than it was ever meant to be.

The camera obscura project proposed by Saroufim would involve inserting custom lenses all around the structure in the voids left from wartime impacts. In turn, these would project city scenes from surrounding architecture into the giant empty interior volume.

As an unrelated video project (above) illustrates, local residents are conflicted about the role The Egg should play in the next phase of the areas urban development, debating the merits of destroying or restoring it and leaving it to loom large.

Some architectural and urban design proposals (such as the one shown above) call for letting taller structures grow up around The Egg as was the original plan. For now, this  temporary installation project would give the Brutalist building relevant meaning in relationship to its historical context, bridging its storied past, unused present and uncertain future.

Point, click, shut! Camera stores are rapidly fading into obsolescence as smartphones take the place of mass market cameras, film and paid photo processing.

Now here’s a developing story… NOT! The long-abandoned Foto Hut on Forbes Avenue in downtown Pittsburgh sold cameras, film and greeting cards while promising to develop film in an unknown number of “hour” – well, either “one” or “24”, it’s hard to tell from the red rectangle on the Kodak Yellow sign. Kudos to Flickr users strawbrryff and john (J Blough) for capturing this frozen-in-time, eternally bankrupt abandoned camera store in November 2010 and February 2011 respectively.

Chick Clinic

Once a one-stop-shop for Louisville, Kentucky’s photo fans, Schuhmann’s Click Clinic opened in 1946 and its eye-popping animated signage dates from the early 1950s. Schuhmann’s kicked the bucket in 2001, however, and the sign out front was modified to advertise the store’s new tenants: the Show-N-Tell Showgirls Lounge. No cameras allowed, we’re guessing.

Takes a licking and keeps on clicking? Both the club and the subsequent owners, the circa-2013 Meta bar, cleverly modified the front signage while completely ignoring the former camera store’s other sign, mounted on the back of the building overlooking the parking lot.

Foto Finis

Flickr user Who Cares? (busy.pochi) snapped this abandoned Photographies camera and book store in February of 2011, and it didn’t take long for graffiti taggers and handbill posters to take advantage of the stores neglected status. One would think a city as photogenic as Paris could support at least a few camera stores.

Morgue & Camera

A Hollywood landmark since the 1930s, Morgan Camera Shop finally gave up the ghost a few years into the twenty-first century. Boasting an idyllic location amongst Hollywood’s iconic tall palms and a sign influenced by Bauhaus architecture, Morgan Camera played a large roll in introducing 35mm photography to the United States from Europe.

Morgan Camera exists in an odd sort of limbo – closed to be sure, but otherwise left pretty much alone inside and out thanks to the efforts of the Morgan family, members of whom who still own both the shop and the building.

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Photo Finished 12 Closed Abandoned Camera Stores

Notoriously restrictive of the media, the North Korean government surprisingly granted the request of an outsider seeking to shoot a virtually unprecedented video: a continuous car tour of the nation’s largest and capital city.

Aran Pan of Singapore is a photographer and cinematographer given unique permission to document this secretive country, boasting, among other accomplishments, the first series of 3D panoramas shot within its borders and visible to the outside world.

While the film itself is uncut and uncensored, its filming meant traveling with a state-appointed driver, translator, photographer and overseeing official.

The mission of this project, titled DPRK 360, is not to reveal any hidden agenda (or architecture) but simply to convey a sense of place. If anything, the filmmaker hopes his viewers will come away with the idea that there is beauty in North Korea.

Indeed, the streets seem almost unnaturally serene – quiet and nearly empty – and the path traveled (though potentially by design) is quite clean and relatively unremarkable in itself. The buildings, too, are bland if anything, with hints of Asian architectural styles as well as Neoclassical influences.

As improved game graphics generate increasingly photo-realistic spaces, projects like this blur the boundaries between virtual and real in perception-warping ways. Test and see for yourself: how long do you have to stare at each picture to ascertain what elements comes from within the game and which ones are derived from everyday reality?

Referencing Jean Baudrillard (of Simulacra and Simulation), gamer and photographer Benoit Paillé of Montreal, Quebec explains his aim to “overlay a material reality with a virtual one, erasing the border between the two worlds … to show that we can use a virtual space in conceptual photography and approach these areas with the same sensitivity as the physical space.”

The process of making Crossroads of Realities involved carefully capturing in-game scenes from Grand Theft Auto V, then simulating the same conditions (time of day, angle of light, conditions of weather) in a real photograph of a human hand holding an image-capturing device. These images were then hybridized into finished shots representing uncanny combinations of virtual and physical reality.

As to his inspiration: “It is a response to the proliferation of visual projects that take place in virtual spaces. It is a questioning about the notion of border and territory. A mix of two distinct realities into a single image. I ask questions about the legitimacy and the authorship of artwork created this way.”

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Crossroad Of Realities Photography Subverts Gaming Scenes

The ultimate at-home hacker project, this strange small-world effect was created using a half-dozen GoPro cameras, a 3D printer and a technique that turns ordinary panoramic shots into a surreal world-warping wraparound experience.

German photographer, journalist and inventor Jonas Ginter cobbled together his cubic ball of cameras then mounted this oddball creation above his bike, all to generate the effect you see in the video above. Given the accessibility of the constituent technologies (and his helpful instructions), suddenly the idea of 3D video capture is within reach of any enthusiastic hobbyist.

The stereographic distortion, while a neat effect, is also helpful in rendering a three-dimensional view into a two-dimensional frame. As for the idea, here is a bit more from the creator (summary translation to follow): “Ich habe mir seltsame Konstruktionen mit Spiegeln angeguckt und frustriert festgestellt, dass das absoluter Quatsch ist. Stück für Stück kam die Erkenntnis, dass ich 360-Grad-Videos nur realisieren kann, wenn ich das Bild in einem Take aufnehme. Die logische Konsequenz hieß also: Viele Kameras.”

Above, Ginter explains his slow realization that to realize a 360-degree video he would have to do everything in a single take, which in turn means having multiple cameras.  While his takes so far are interesting in themselves, the possibilities are amazing – but consider just the fun consumer applications, like capturing a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree skydive or mounting this on the car roof for a road trip. You can read his summary on Ginter’s website, either in the original German or using Google Translate.