- Principle of the camera obscura 1671
What is a camera obscura?
According to Webster’s dictionary it is a darkened box with a convex lens or aperture for projecting the image of an external object onto a screen inside, a forerunner of the modern camera.
- A small round building with a rotating angled mirror at the apex of the roof, projecting the image of the landscape on the horizontal surface inside
- The term originates from latin in the 18th century : camera = room , obscura = dark
One of the first people to get close to the discovery of the camera obscura was Aristotle studying the stars.
The article "Simulachrum, species, forma, imago: What Was Transported by Light into the Camera Obscura?" by Isabelle Pantin discusses the beginning of the camera obscura and Kepler’s observations that brought to it. Aristotle assumed the illumination and vision are created by a change in the state of the medium. Kepler tries to clarify the problems posed by Aristotle related to light and the refraction of light. He explains what actually happens and how things work as part of the camera obscura. He says that “Light is an incorporeal state of the medium, it is the “activity of transparency” (because it actualizes the transparency that the medium possesses in potency).Thus, illumination involves no temporal process and no local movement, but only motion in the sense of qualitative change. Color, the proper object of sight, produces, in the actually transparent medium, further qualitative change which affects the observer”.
The article states that “As soon as everyone agrees on the simple idea that light carries representations of things, there can be no real misunderstanding. “Light takes nothing else with it than the image of things, which you may call forma, or simulacrum, or idolum, or species, or spectrum: that does not matter, provided that you only mean what represents the thing.”
From here we already have the idea that the image created is a simulacrum, something representing the original object, a concept addressed by Baudriard, Joseph Kosuth (with the chair project), Rene Magritte (with this is not a pipe) and many others. The simulacrum, the projected image in case is the first photograph and begins a new medium into the art work that has and still does create a discourse on originality and the aura that John Berger describes .
In the article by Pantin, Aguilonus describes the way a camera obscura works by saying that “it is sufficient to note that the image is inverted, that its luminous intensity is attenuated, and that its dimension depends on the distance of the screen”.
The camera obscura was first discovered with the purpose of astronomical research, but was later mostly used by artists to bring the outside inside the room and paint. Susan Grundy writes about David Hockneys analysis of the use of the camera obscura, since he states that scientists like Della Porta wrote extensively about it and might have passed the knowledge to some artists , one of them being Caravaggio; there is no evidence for it though.
Another artist widely associated with the use if the camera obscura is Vermeer , since his paintings are not flat, very life like, he was able to capture the change in light better than with the naked eye.
In “Camera Lucida” Roland Barthes , talks about the beginning of photography and the camera . He explains that the image produced is the outside in a new setting; it has no signification since it is not the real object, but it can generate many meanings. Barthes also says that a “photograph is like old age; even in its splendor it disincarnates the face, manifests its generic essence” ( Barthes, Camera Lucida). The photograph want to capture the real in a given moment, but most often is depicts a staging of the real .
http://www.webexhibits.org/hockneyoptic ... undy5.html
Pantin Isabelle, Simulachrum, species, forma, imago: What Was Transported by Light into the Camera Obscura?: Divergent Conceptions of Realism Revealed by Lexical Ambiguities at the Beginning of the Seventeenth Century.; Early Science and Medicine; 2008, Vol.13 Issue 3, p245-269, 25p
http://www.acmi.net.au/AIC/CAMERA_OBSCURA.html
Barthes Roland, Camera Lucida, Hill and Wang, New York 1981
http://www.dwell.com/articles/designing-detroit.html)
http://sarahsilverwood.blogspot.com/sea ... hotography