The Camera Obscura is the inception of the modern moving image as we understand that phenomenon of eye trickery that we see Animation, motion design, 3D graphics and other optical illusions that we both see and trick our minds into understanding as a moving image. It is quite moving to witness this historical unfolding into its modern art form, and the advent of the influx of movement in still images that transformed picture making and motion in image as we are still developing it right up until today. Welcome to the Moving Image series.
Camera Obscura
Camera Obscura is where I will begin my meandering wanderings. This is a Latin term for dark chamber, and is important to remember when I eventually return back to photography, which was an attempt to capture snapshots of our reality onto a still image.
Obscura is a naturally happening effect from a ray of light going through a small hole (or pinhole) into a darkroom. These rays of light then project an upside down, 180 degree rotated image onto another surface, usually of the outside world. This can also happen in darkened rooms, boxes and tents. It is said that some Paleolithic cave paintings were made using this natural version of the technique, but these ideas lead into inventions such as Pinhole art/effects and Sundials in places like Eurasia. In Euclid's Optics (300 CE), reliable nuance of the reception of light rays into the eye through the eyes lens, past the macula and vitreous body and into the retina and onto the brain was described in relation to these effects.[2] Albeit without the Latin.
Classical Asia
In Classical China, Mozi observed the effect of pinhole images in
how the image in a "collecting-point" or "treasure house" is inverted by an intersecting point (pinhole) that collects the (rays of) light. Light coming from the foot of an illuminated person gets partly hidden below (i.e., strikes below the pinhole) and partly forms the top of the image. Rays from the head are partly hidden above (i.e., strike above the pinhole) and partly form the lower part of the image.[2]
Other Chinese officials are said to have seen similar effects during the Tang Dynasty when a pagoda was reflected by the sea on a wall, but poo-pooed it as being incorrect, because 'obviously' (really smart patient Chinese official: eye roll) only pinhole Obscuras did that silly Tang Dynasty observer, Tuan Cheng-Shih (act 863).[3]
Abū Yūsuf Yaʻqūb ibn ʼIsḥāq aṣ-Ṣabbāḥ al-Kindī ( Arabic: أبو يوسف يعقوب بن إسحاق الصبّاح الكندي | c. 801–873 CE ) used pinhole images to assert his theory that light travelled in a straight line.[2] Ibn al-Haytham ( 965 – c. 1040 ) used the Obscura to record solar eclipses, underlining the difference between the focal point and the projection (the ability for the image to be on the wall or not).
The image of the sun at the time of the eclipse, unless it is total, demonstrates that when its light passes through a narrow, round hole and is cast on a plane opposite to the hole it takes on the form of a moon-sickle. The image of the sun shows this peculiarity only when the hole is very small. When the hole is enlarged, the picture changes, and the change increases with the added width. When the aperture is very wide, the sickle-form image will disappear, and the light will appear round when the hole is round, square if the hole is square, and if the shape of the opening is irregular, the light on the wall will take on this shape, provided that the hole is wide and the plane on which it is thrown is parallel to it.[2]
Astronomers such as the Egyptian Ibn Yunus ( 950-1009 CE ) are said to have observed similar pinhole effects, most of whom were dismissed for being frivolous and engaging with 'magic'. Remember dear audience, Science is now the known world, Magic the unknown. That's the difference. The rest we don't know, even when they tell you they do. Back to Images!
Medieval Europe
In 1200, glass was a new fun shiny thing. People looked through it. This was this start of Optics. Ibn al-Haytham was a fan favourite among the English, including Robert Grosseteste ( 1175-1253 CE ), John Peckham ( 1230-1292 CE ) and Roger Bacon ( 1219ish-1292ish CE ) and in Poland Vitello Thuringopolonis ( 1230 – 1280ish CE ), but al-Kindi and Euclid are the most quoted on Camera Obscura. In scholarly circles however, Camera Obscura was known by around 1268. Around this time, Hibernia (Spain and Portugal back then) gets invaded by Muslims crusaders and so England adapts to the new Muslim overlords. Thus it could have been known of Kamāl al-Dīn al-Fārisī's (1267–1319 CE ) experiements with Camera Obscura and light refractions to create rainbows on walls using light prisms in a suspended glass sphere in water.[2] Humans mostly just made sundials and maps with this revelation because they were too busy doing Mercantile-Capitalism (proto-Empire stuff) at the time.
Leonardo da Vinci wrote of the first pinhole Obscura in 1502, using the classical wall-sun + paper equation in his version. Obscuras using a lens (warped glass/metal) in the pinhole opening have been well known since around since 1550, with Gerolamo Cardano's version. They were originally used for many things including to study eclipses, a big part of astronomy and cartography and ship-navigation at the time. Colonisation. Exploration. Pinholes. Around 1500, Rome became very colonisey, very Treaty of Tordesillas, anti-Saracen, 1930s Germany, Dum Diversas, so there was lots of money floating around from the spice trade and the slave trade. So the Italians could pay polymaths to invent things and promote Italian culture, such as Art. Something to keep in mind.
About that time, they are documented to have become used as drawing and painting aids and then tools, first in 1558 by one of those, Giambattista della Porta.
As a drawing aid, it allowed tracing the projected image to produce a highly accurate representation, and was especially appreciated as an easy way to achieve proper graphical perspective.[2]
Between 1550-1600 Obscura were known as cubiculum obscurum, cubiculum tenebricosum, conclave obscurum, and locus obscurus.[2] In 1573, Ignazio Danti described Euclids version of the pinhole Obscura effect for example.[2] In 1589, Porta recommended the projection of the moving image to project things such as Hunting scenes, to project onto a wall as a background for theatre dramas and for children to act in.[2] Popular use of the Camera Obscura came about by 1600 as a form of entertainment, but had been used in Europe for this end (Genoa; spice trade wars) since 1299 as pinhole entertainment.
17th century Obscura
During this century, Obscura became widespread amongst elites as entertainment for their children. Kepler coined the term in 1604, when studying Optics. In 1607, the telescope was invented by the Dutchman Hans Lipperhey ( 1570-1619 ). Remember, 1600s. Still on glass/metal, wood, wall and paper at this point. This was why Camera Obscura were sidelined as useful for about 150 years, as they were seen as gimmicks of a bygone age of widgets and gadgets for Opticians, Astronomers and other nerds.
Cornelis Drebbel ( 1572-1633 CE ) then invented a modern right way round Camera Obscura. Drebbel's Camera also moved around to capture its surroundings. In 1622, Drebbel gifted a Camera to his friend Constantijn Huygens who used it to paint and recommended it to his artist friends.[52] Huygens wrote to his parents:
I have at home Drebbel's other instrument, which certainly makes admirable effects in painting from reflection in a dark room; it is not possible for me to reveal the beauty to you in words; all painting is dead by comparison, for here is life itself or something more elevated if one could articulate it. The figure and the contour and the movements come together naturally therein and in a grandly pleasing fashion.
Obscura as Art Guide
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Whilst it is likely that Camera Obscura were used as tools by 1540, it is more likely their starting date would be around 1250-1450 as observed in the Falco-Hockney hypothesis, with artists like the Netherland Primitives using them as art guide tools.[4] The thesis states that artists most likely artists such as Jan van Eyck until Vermeer used these advanced scientific tools as aids in finishing compositional flourishes which to the untrained layperson would not be important, are in fact very important to getting the edge on other artists in this particular period for securing royal patronage.
By the age of Drebbel, these tools were so widely known amongst the small group responsible for their creation and shared usage, that it eventually mellowed out those involved and their use was more widespread until the likes of Vermeer used these not as magic workarounds but tools, like the difference between a fine horsehair brush and a wallpaper brush kind of nuance. One paints walls, the other is a specialist craft tool. Both are brushes, but both do different jobs. Hence to art historians, they get all 'ohmigod my profession', to artists 'yep, its a brush'. Because artists understand how to paint, art historians understand what is within the scholastic limits of their paperwork. Anywho.
There is indeed a lack of clear documented evidence, but hypothetically, medieval European art relied heavily on optical aids it seems to get the Eyck, Holbein, and Hilliard levels of detail found in Northern Renaissance portraiture in particular, and later Vermeer vernacular architecture these images have that even modern audiences find so moving. Artists such as Leon B Alberti (1404-1472) and and Filippo Brunelleschi distinctly used these peephole box devices in similar fashions as other artists for effect. Exact replicas are not what art always aims for, or hyperrealism would be all the rage.
Effect is the key goal in mind for these people. Falco-Hockney posits Obscura at this time to discover effective mirrored lines and perspective as the result of the Humanist and Renaissance thinkers discoveries which artists still use to this day to make an image feel as if it is coming 'alive' and would move around. This matter continued from 1450 to 1550, as these were highly technical instruments kept away from most people. Also pigment is expensive back then. Hella expensive. Mix that together and you get me being tired and hot and missing out 100 years of research.[4] Obscura at this time however were distinctly used as a projection tool to assist Renaissance painters with geometrical intricacies the human eye has difficulty differentiating and finding without the proper equipment. The intricate argument for this is Hockneys rendering of Husband and Wife (1543), by focusing on an unfocused section only possible if an Obscura device was used.[4] It is believed some sort of tool like a Camera Obscura or lens was used to convey these images. Indeed primitive versions such as Vinci's paper version have been used in architecture since 1568.[4]
Obscura remained trinkets of entertainment for the wealthy and the interested definitively after then. These became smaller and portable by 1657. By 1659, the Magic Lantern was introduced superseding the Obscura. The Obscura remained a useful tool for artists and scientists requiring precision and accuracy however. As the English polymath Robert Hooke noted:
various apparitions and disappearances, the motions, changes and actions" by means of a broad convex-glass in a camera obscura setup: "if the picture be transparent, reflect the rays of the sun so as that they may pass through it towards the place where it is to be represented; and let the picture be encompassed on every side with a board or cloth that no rays may pass beside it. If the object be a statue or some living creature, then it must be very much enlightened by casting the sun beams on it by refraction, reflexion, or both." For models that can't be inverted, like living animals or candles, he advised: "let two large glasses of convenient spheres be placed at appropriate distances".[2]
Artists such as Vermeer (1632-1675) picked up the use of Obscura for example. The mirrors of the day however were more like metal sheets, hence the dimming effect proposed in some images compared to later 19th century optical tools in painting due to the inclusion of new optical glass lenses (c1850).[3] It has long been said that the Medieval artists have incredibly lifelike, almost photographic qualities of painting.
And now, Japan
In Japan, Obscura were made popular by the Dutch traders in the 1650s as 'donkuru-kaamuru' ( ドンクルーカームル )。The first Obscura was kept at the Dutch trading House in 1645.[7] With the banning of foreign books between 1640-1720, Obscura knowledge from Encylopaedias in Dutch and European languages became more widely known. This became part of the knowlegde base of Ukiyo-E as Uki-E, published by authors such as Okumura Masanobu ( 奥村 政信 | 1686-1764 ).[6]
Obscura was known by Sugita Genpaku ( 1733-1817 CE ) and Otsuki Gentaku (1757-1827) as Shashin-kyo ( photo mirror ) and as a 'darkroom photo mirror'. It became more widely used in the 1700s, being used by Rangaku scholars and artists like Shiba Kokan (1747-1818) who immersed western perspective and graphic design into their works.[5] By 1800, it may have become a widespread component of Ukiyo-E designers incorporating western perspective into their designs. Other uses include for drafting, topography studies (earthquakes), mapmaking, optics and how photographers worked. Artists such as Hokusai used it in 1834 to make landscape portfolios.[7] And then Sakoku ended and the Autarky was like 'ah, shite, photographs'.
18th century Art in the UK
Art in the 18th century in the UK took inspiration from Obscura as part of landscape training from this point on, as a matter of teaching perspective and topographical composition. Perhaps also geometry. This lead to the popularity of other aids like Claude Glasses, a travelling version of the Obscura was also used to get a 'painterly' later 'picturesque' effect in places of beautiful, sublime and natural beauty across the Isles.
Thomas Gray's [1716 – 30 July 1771] Journal of his Tour in the Lake District, published in 1775, popularized the use of the Claude mirror, sometimes referred to as a "Gray glass" around that time. On one sightseeing trip, Gray was so intent on his glass that he fell backward into "a dirty lane" and broke his knuckles; he later remarked how he kept the glass open in his hand, enabling him to see "the sun set in all its glory". In his influential A Guide to the Lakes (1778), Thomas West [1720 – 10 July 1779] explained "The person using it ought always to turn his back to the object that he views. It should be suspended by the upper part of the case ... holding it a little to the right or the left (as the position of the parts to be viewed require) and the face screened from the sun." He recommended carrying two different mirrors: "one to manage reflections of great and near objects and a flatter glass for distant and small objects."[9]
Of the Camera Obscura:
It should be remembered that when the device began to be used by professional painters in the eighteenth century, it was never intended as to aid to capture light or darkness, or reproduce color. When mentioned in relation to painting it was almost universally understood to be useful in rendering a complex scene into its outlines, reducing a landscape, for instance, into a series of lines, zones, or bands.[3]
These kinds of affective effects were the desired takeaways for moving an audience member with still images at the time, and you may think, why is that important? These images were the basis of some of th largest empirical reaches and lingusitical gauges in the world. That is why. These ideals made and broke some of the oncoming historical legacies of their legacy writers. The damaging sections of these legacies are still being unwritten for posterity's sake, a bit of the work I and others do in these matters.
Goethe (1749–1832) noted that the image cast by the lens causes everything to appear "as covered with a faint bloom, a kind of smokiness that reminds many painters of lard, and that fastens like a vice on the painter who uses the camera obscura." But unlike the reflections in a mirror or water, the projection of the camera is perceived as relatively flat, a fact which is particularity advantageous for the painter.[3]
Either way, how the audience was moved, or the promotion and marketing of the image, was again at the crux of picture making from this point on wherein the Camera Obscura was concerned. I am more concerned with posterity and for that reason am more a fan of the sublime (Romanticism and nature) than the legacy of the 'picturesque' wherein nature requires some 'tweaking'. As Goethe and Hooke pointed out, these matters where taken into the hands of many amateur painters and professional draughtspeople alike and began acquainting their reality with the artistic usages of the Obscura once more for the affect it had upon it's human audiences. Most of which originated in places such as the Lake District, otherwise popularly afterwards known as 'the Lakes', in a bid to familiarise the Southerners about the 'barren' bits up North of the the UK. Thus travel writers and art became the popular new gentrification hobby of the previously gentleman scholar of naked marble and naked lady paintings.
The Romantics pursued these types of sublime ideals:
Rev. William Gilpin (1724–1804), a schoolmaster in Surrey, toured Britain and visited the Falls of Clyde.[4] He built an enormously influential theory on this convergence of travel and artistic recreation.[8]
For example, the Bonnington Hall of Mirrors was an early Scottish Obscura on an estate looking over Corra Linn Falls, a scenic waterfall spot with ties to local myths. Romantics and popular painters at the time loved these types of scenes, so they were known to visit it themselves.[8] Including J. M. W. Turner, Sir Walter Scott, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his friend William Wordsworth all visited.
In the 1820s, William West returned and gentrified a windmill, because thats what Southerners do. Live in cities. And capitalism. And then say that capitalism is what is innovative. Because thats not extractive exploitation of natural resources or anything. (I'm still mad about Colonialism being done. See what Marx was up to in Manchester and a pub).
The building was erected, with the permission of the Society of Merchant Venturers, as a windmill for corn in 1766 and later converted to the grinding of snuff, when it became known as 'The Snuff Mill'. This was damaged by fire on 30 October 1777, when the sails were left turning during a gale and caused the equipment to catch alight. It was then derelict for 52 years until in 1828 William West, an artist, rented the old mill, for 5 shillings (25p) a year, as a studio. By 1842, West had converted the building into an observatory incorporating reflecting and achromatic telescopes and a camera obscura, charging one shilling for visitors or an annual membership of 10s. 6d.
West installed telescopes and a camera obscura, which were used by artists of the Bristol School to draw the Avon Gorge and Leigh Woods on the opposite side.[1] Many examples of these paintings can be seen in Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery. The pictures which originated from images within the camera obscura he called 'photogenic drawing'[7] and were based on the work of William Fox Talbot.[10]
Many of these works also helped popularise things like the Bristol school of Art and supported local Northern artists who were usually too busy dying in the coal mines and factories and dark satanic mills, so at least he did it for art it must be said. Either way, Mr.West was the principal type of man who would use a full Camera Obscura in the 18th century in the UK for painting. The exciting thing about Clifton Observatory is that it preceded and was used by Talbot who is credited with inventing the British camera (more on that later) and shows a clear line being drawn between landscape painting art and photographical art as a means to showcase the Sublime in Nature and British culture with the wider audiences who saw these Romantical and Sublime (not picturesque Mr. Gentrifier) moving images.
Cameras
By 1830, the Camera Obscura became the plate negative Camera we all have in our magic boxes you are probably reading this HTML on. [C]amera obscura boxes were used to expose light-sensitive materials to the projected image. The image (or the principle of its projection) of a lensless camera obscura is also referred to as a "pinhole image".[2] This became the basis for some works between 1800 and 1830 which became major parts of how the art of photography was born, but more on that later.
Bonus content because I can: Autostereograms
Autostereograms are optical illusions which came about from experiments with light, dark and optical eye tricks. OR:
The eye operates like a photographic camera. It has an adjustable iris which can open (or close) to allow more (or less) light to enter the eye. As with any camera except pinhole cameras, it needs to focus light rays entering through the iris (aperture in a camera) so that they focus on a single point on the retina in order to produce a sharp image. The eye achieves this goal by adjusting a lens behind the cornea to refract light appropriately. When a person stares at an object, the two eyeballs rotate sideways to point to the object, so that the object appears at the center of the image formed on each eye's retina. In order to look at a nearby object, the two eyeballs rotate towards each other so that their eyesight can converge on the object. This is referred to as cross-eyed viewing. To see a faraway object, the two eyeballs diverge to become almost parallel to each other. This is known as wall-eyed viewing, where the convergence angle is much smaller than that in cross-eyed viewing. Stereo-vision based on parallax allows the brain to calculate depths of objects relative to the point of convergence. It is the convergence angle that gives the brain the absolute reference depth value for the point of convergence from which absolute depths of all other objects can be inferred.[11]
Around 1838, a British guy:
Charles Wheatstone published an example of cooperation between the images in the two eyes: stereopsis (binocular depth perception). He explained that the depth arose from differences in the horizontal positions of the images in the two eyes. He supported his explanation by showing flat, two-dimensional pictures with such horizontal differences, stereograms, separately to the left and right eyes through a stereoscope he invented based on mirrors. From such pairs of flat images, people experienced the illusion of depth.[11]
This was basically a Camera Obscura, but VR headset, but without electricity involved. Then another British guy was like, huh this wallpaper looks funny:
In 1844, David Brewster discovered the "wallpaper effect". He noticed that when he stared at repeated patterns in wallpapers while varying his vergence, he could see them either behind the wall (with wall-eyed vergence) or in front of the wall (with cross-eyed vergence). This is the basis of wallpaper-style autostereograms.[11]
And that is is we discovered eye mess or stereoscopy. And now you have modern lenses! Whoopie! In the modern day and age:
In 1979, Christopher Tyler [...] a student of Julesz and a visual psychophysicist, combined the theories behind single-image wallpaper stereograms and random-dot stereograms [...] to create the first black-and-white random-dot autostereogram with the assistance of computer programmer Maureen Clarke[. ...] This type of autostereogram allows a person to see 3D shapes from a single 2D image without the aid of optical equipment. In 1991 computer programmer Tom Baccei and artist Cheri Smith created the first color random-dot autostereograms, later marketed as Magic Eye. In the late '90s many children's magazines featured autostereograms. Even gaming magazines like Nintendo Power had a section specifically made for these illusions.[11]
And that is the influence of the Camera Obscura (or the lack of light, holy walls and lenses) on how we find images moving.
Bibliography
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autostereogram
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camera_obscura
[3] https://www.essentialvermeer.com/camera_obscura/co_one.html
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockney%E2%80%93Falco_thesis
[5] https://photoguide.jp/txt/PhotoHistory_1646-1867#:~:text=The%20camera%20obscura%20arrives%20in,the%20camera%20was%20probably%20defective.
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uki-e
[7] https://bonryu.com/atelier_bonryu_e/PH_Salon_1.4.html
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonnington_Pavilion
[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_glass
[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifton_Observatory
[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autostereogram
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