The Jersey Museum Exhibition That Makes a Grey Day Worth Having

In November you can leave the house in daylight and come back to find every window on the street lit up. It’s a good month for an exhibition about what people have done with light, from finding their way at sea to taking a photograph before there was a phone in every pocket.

Playing With Light opened at Jersey Museum on 24 October and is listed through the end of 2027. The exhibition looks at timekeeping, lighting our homes and keeping shipping safe, as well as the entertainment people made with optical devices. There’s a camera obscura to step inside and a look at the work of Jersey’s early photographers. Jersey Heritage’s exhibition page

Give the camera obscura a minute

The delight of a camera obscura is how little there is to it. Light from the scene outside passes through a small opening or lens and produces an image inside a dark space. A camera on your phone hides most of that process. Here there’s time to see the principle and ask why the picture looks the way it does.

If you’re going with children, ask them to explain what they think is happening before you read the label out loud. You might get a better conversation from their guesses than from the correct answer. Older children can think about where they’d set up a camera in town and what would drift into the frame. The pavement on a market morning would make a very different picture from the harbour at dusk.

Why does this belong in a Jersey museum?

An island gives you lots of ways to think about light. There’s the light that makes a photograph, and there’s the one somebody out at sea needs to recognise in the dark. There’s the lamp over a kitchen table and the row of shop windows that changes how a familiar street feels after closing time. You can pick up on any of those threads and look for it when you leave.

The early photography material is especially good for that. Next time you see an old street photograph, look at the edge of it. A shop sign, a shadow or the clothes of someone in the background can tell you things the photographer probably wasn’t trying to record. That’s part of the fun of the old Jersey pictures. The details can be more arresting than the scene you were meant to look at.

The exhibition is at Jersey Museum in the Weighbridge area. Check with Jersey Heritage for opening hours and visitor information before going. Allow enough time to follow whatever catches your eye. On the way home, try looking up at the lit windows over the shops. It’s an easy way to carry a bit of the exhibition back out with you.