This is a photograph taken of the world passing by outside, projected inside Ellen Sollod's new installation at Jack Straw Gallery.

Her installation celebrates Jack Straw's 50th anniversary by turning the gallery into a camera obscura. An accompanying sound score is made of historical and contemporary found noise, samplings from the life of the new media center.

Sollod made the camera obscura by covering a gallery window with a sheet of opaque black plastic with a hole cut in it. She mounted a lens in the blackout shade on the window, and voilà! Live projection with an ancient twist.

The show is open weekdays through August 17.

Want to make a tour of it? There's a great camera obscura in Vancouver, B.C., at UBC's Belkin Gallery. It's a permanent installation by Rodney Graham. The projection happens inside a 19th-century horse-drawn landau carriage (!) parked inside a glass pavilion built especially for it. The outside vision you see is of a landscaped garden, with a young sequoia tree in the center. It's called Millennial Time Machine, and here's a view:

In far more contemporary camera news, have you heard about the new "best pocket camera ever made"?