The History of Photography has long been one of my favorite subjects. When I was registering for college and needed to declare a major my choice was between some facet of history or photography. I didn’t know then that by the time I graduated I would have taken two semesters of Art History and two semesters of the History of Photography. So I got the best of both worlds in the end.
I thought it would be fun to create a series of posts covering various periods significant in the History of Photography, and to start off, I’ll be looking at how this box thing we call a camera came to be.
The concept of a camera, or that of what would eventually become known as a camera obscura, was first documented in the 5th Century, BC in China by a guy named Mo Ti. He observed that if you stood in a darkened room and put a pinhole in one wall, an image of the objects outside the room would be projected upside-down and backwards on the opposite wall. Aristotle, a few hundred years later, recorded his wondering why it is that when the sun passes “through…wickerwork, it does not produce a figure rectangular in shape but circular?...Why is it that an eclipse of the sun, if one looks at it through a sieve or through leaves, such as a plane-tree or other broadleaved tree, or if one joins the fingers of one hand over the fingers of the other, the rays are crescent-shaped where they reach the earth? Is it for the same reason as that when light shines through a rectangular peep-hole, it appears circular in the form of a cone?”
The first extensive studies and descriptions of the camera obscura phenomenon were made by the Arab physicist Al Hazen in the 11th century. Among his experiments was his discovery that by using a smaller pinhole, image sharpness would increase.
Al Hazen’s experiments first influenced English philosopher and Franciscan friar Roger Bacon. Bacon explained that a solar eclipse could be safely studied using a camera obscura to then observe the shape projected by the rays of light passing through the aperture.
Leonardo Da Vinci was also familiar with and influenced by the Latin translation of Al Hazen’s work. In 1502, Da Vinci recorded:
“If the facade of a building, or a place, or a landscape is illuminated by the sun and a small hole is drilled in the wall of a room in a building facing this, which is not directly lighted by the sun, then all objects illuminated by the sun will send their images through this aperture and will appear, upside down, on the wall facing the hole. You will catch these pictures on a piece of white paper, which placed vertically in the room not far from that opening, and you will see all the above-mentioned objects on this paper in their natural shapes or colors, but they will appear smaller and upside down, on account of crossing of the rays at that aperture. If these pictures originate from a place which is illuminated by the sun, they will appear colored on the paper exactly as they are. The paper should be very thin and must be viewed from the back.”
Over the course of his life, Da Vinci drew around 270 diagrams of the camera obscura, and he experimented with various shapes and sizes of apertures.
Although the principles of the camera obscura had been known since the 5th century B.C., it wasn’t until 1604 that this device finally got a name, in a book Ad Vitellionem Paralipmena written by German mathematician Johannes Kepler. Kepler discovered how the camera obscura works by threading a string connected to the edges of a book though an aperture cut into a table. This recreated the shape of the book on the opposite side of the aperture. With the aid of the camera obscura he studied the sun, and in 1607, he discovered sunspot, which he mistook for Mercury transiting the sun. Kepler continued experimenting with the camera obscura, making it portable in the form of a tent which he used to draw landscapes.
The camera obscura had been used as a drawing aid since the Renaissance, and it is widely speculated, and even perhaps hotly disputed whether and to what extend the Dutch Masters like Jan Van Eyck and Johannes Vermeer utilized the camera obscura to aid their paintings. The argument for their extensive use of the camera obscura was largely pushed forward by David Hockney and Charles Falco, and is known as the Hockney-Falco Thesis. In 1999, while looking at portraits by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, he became convinced from their accuracy that Ingres must have used a camera lucida, or something similar. Hockney then looked for evidence of the use of optical drawing aids in other paintings, and in 2001, he and Falco published their analysis in their book Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters.
Jan van Eyck, The Arnolfini Portrait
Johannes Vermeer, Girl with the Red Hat
The camera obscura would go see many improvements over time by using improved optics, and getting more and more miniaturized. In 1805, William Hyde Wollaston invented the camera lucida, a contraption that would be clamped to a table. It had a long upright arm that held a half-silvered mirror that could be set at an angle. The half-silvered mirror let the user see their subject, but they could also see through the mirror to a sheet of paper on the table. The user could then trace their subject below.
All of these developments only cover one side of the equation of recording an image of nature “automatically.” In the next post I’ll take a look at the experiments done in the search for fixing light.