Camera Obscura

Summary of Camera Obscura

The term "camera obscura," from the Latin "dark room," is a name given to an enclosed darkened chamber or box with a tiny aperture that allows a concentrated beam of light to enter the chamber. The aperture projects an inverted three-dimensional image of the exterior world onto the interior surface, typically a wall or sheet of paper. The discovery of this phenomenon set in motion a centuries-long procession of advances in image-making. Given that the finely-detailed image could be traced by the human hand, this optical wonder compelled artists (and scientists) to ask new questions about picture perspective. For the art world, however, the device(s) proved something of a double-edged sword that, on the one hand, allowed for greater realism, but on the other, carried the potential to undercut notions of artistic genius and to spoil reputations. This dilemma became most acute during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when the camera obscura became more mobile and adapted to accommodate the new proliferation of mirrors and lenses.

The camera obscura was fully overtaken in the mid-eighteenth century with the invention of the photographic camera. Its light-sensitive photographic paper or plate produced a permanent image that effectively ended the intervention of an artist's hand. By then, however, the model of the camera obscura had led to the invention of the magic lantern, the antecedent of the cinema; the camera lucida, a copying device that eliminated the need for a darkened room; and, after the invention of photography, the pinhole camera, a primitive, lens-free camera that captured a permanent image, but retained all the timelessness and charm of the original camera obscura.

Key Ideas & Accomplishments

• The camera obscura played a vital role in shaping new understandings around light and vision. Its invention (or, rather, its discovery) would lay the ground for new perceptions of the linearity of light and the workings of optics. In the sphere of art specifically, the camera obscura offered new possibilities regarding the representation of perspective and the depth of field.
• Despite there being no definitive proof linking the camera obscura to artistic practice, major painters including Holbein, Caravaggio, Vermeer, Canaletto, and Ingres have all been suspected of using such optical aids in their work. This idea (or accusation) has proved highly contentious, fundamentally because it runs counter to the belief that artistic genius comes with a freehand, or is even God-given.
• Over the centuries, the camera obscura evolved as it accommodated new developments in optics. Ultimately, however, its great legacy was to lay the ground for the dawning of a revolution in the visual arts. Indeed, the camera obscura provided the basis for the modern camera and the age of photographic mass reproduction.
• The birth of modern reproductive photography effectively signaled the end of the camera obscura and its various descendants. However, the "innocent" nature of these early devices still holds appeal for some artists to the present day.. George Davison (camera obscura), David Hockney (camera lucida), and Shi Guorui (camera obscura) have all seized on the timeless potential of these relatively primitive devices.

The Important Artists and Works of Camera Obscura

Artwork Images

1601-02

The Incredulity of Saint Thomas

Artist: Caravaggio

Caravaggio's The Incredulity of Saint Thomas depicts the gospel of St. John in which ("doubting") Thomas expresses disbelief having heard word of (rather than witnessed for himself) Christ's resurrection from his fellow apostles. "Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe it," he says. In Caravaggio's realistic composition the three apostles are represented as "ordinary men" (rather than saintly). They are tightly arranged, with Jesus and Thomas occupying the forefront. The painting (one of the artist's most copied) certainly contributed to Caravaggio's legend. As the famed art historian E. H. Gombrich put it, the painting placed Caravaggio in the company of "Giotto and Dürer before him" since, like those great masters, he had "wanted to see the holy events before his own eyes as if they were happening in a neighbour's house."

The English artist, David Hockney, caused considerable controversy when he argued that Caravaggio must have used a version of the camera obscura for this painting because none of the apostles seem to be looking directly at the wound on Christ's body. The art critic and journalist Andrew Marr wrote, "Hockney has a simple theory of how Caravaggio worked. In a letter to Lawrence Weschler of the New Yorker, he described how the painter would divide a basement with a curtain and set up his lens. Then he 'covers the canvas with a rich dark undercoat that, being wet, reflects light back. He takes a brush and with the wrong end draws guidelines for the figures in the composition, to enable him to get the models back in position after [breaks for] resting, eating, pissing, etc ...' Caravaggio would then quickly fill in the difficult bits before dropping the curtain, turning the canvas round and completing the scene in the ordinary way."

Hockney's argument has, however, been somewhat misconstrued. It is true that his observation presented a challenge to the idea that Caravaggio always worked freely with live models, and that any suggestion that he might have used a visual aid weakens the views as expressed by Gombrich and the like. But Hockney did not regard Caravaggio as "a cheat". Indeed, the idea that he could have only achieved such a meticulous composition with the help of a camera obscura was completely legitimate and therefore it did nothing to devalue his genius. As Hockney said, "[a camera obscura] can't draw a line, only the hand can do that, the artist's hand and eye [...] This whole insight about optical aids doesn't diminish anything; it merely suggests a different story."

Oil on canvas - Sanssouci, Potsdam, Berlin

Artwork Images

1652

A View of Delft, with a Musical Instrument Seller's Stall

Artist: Carel Fabritius

The View of Delft, a miniature panoramic picture (measuring only 15.4 x 31.6 cm.), is an anamorphic view of the Dutch city. In the foreground, a sullen-looking street vendor guards a lute and a bass viol while to his left, in the background, we see the Nieuwe Kerk church, the Town Hall and a row of houses that stretch along the canal. The church is illumined against a blue and white sky while the glorious summer sky allows the trees to cast their shadows over buildings in a scene of many tonal reflections. Fabritius incorporated his signature into the scene, too, placing it on the wall behind the vendor, almost as if it were a piece of graffiti. The painting was completed two years after the son of Willem the Silent, Prince Willem II, had died and been laid to rest in the Nieuwe Kerk leading some to speculate that the painting was prompted in some way by the prince's death.

This scene is, however, most remarkable for its unusual and complex play on perspective. The image appears as if viewed through a wide-angle lens. This striking visual effect is underlined by the dramatic foreshortening of the viol in the foreground. It is believed that the painting was intended to be displayed on a curved surface, or viewed through a cylindrical perspective box, in which case the image would appear proportionate as seen in three-dimensions. Although it cannot be ascertained exactly what type of modified camera obscura the painting was created by, it is known that Fabritius experimented with, and even built, such devices using different lenses (as did his friend Samuel van Hoogstraten, whose Peepshow with Views of the Interior of a Dutch House (1655-60) was executed just a few years after this work by Fabritius). Indeed, according to the writings of van Hoogstraten, Fabritius worked on several larger such paintings though these were most likely lost in the explosion that destroyed his workshop (and cut short his life).

Art historian Walter Liedtke believes it highly likely that, while studying under Rembrandt in Amsterdam, Fabritius was introduced by the great master to optical aids that offered new and intriguing ideas on how to accurately render perspective. Liedtke argues in fact that Fabritius's View of Delft "is one of the greatest and historically most significant monuments of seventeenth-century Dutch painting not because it broke with the tradition in any way, but precisely because it represents a conscious effort to extend the established representational conventions in accord with a deepening interest in the physical environment."

Oil on canvas - National Gallery, London

c. 1657

De Soldaat en het Lachende Meisje (Officer and Laughing Girl)

Artist: Johannes Vermeer

It is widely believed that the great Dutch master Johannes Vermeer, used a camera obscura as an aid to his painting. The device was well established in the form of closed rooms, cubicles, or tents in the seventeenth century. As many have pointed out, there is no documentary evidence to support this hypothesis. But close analysis of the paintings themselves seems to lend considerable weight to the argument. The first person to make the suggestion, as long ago as 1891, was the American graphic artist Joseph Pennell, who drew attention to what he called the "photographic perspective" of Vermeer's Officer and Laughing Girl.

Pennell noted that the soldier and the girl sit closely together across a table in what is a perfect compositional balance. The foreground objects, the soldier and his chair in this case, appear proportionately large when compared to his companion. As Philip Steadman, author of Vermeer's Camera (2001), describes, "The two figures sit very close across the corner of the table. But the image of the officer's head is about twice as wide as that of the smiling girl. The perspective is perfectly correct in a geometrical sense: the discrepancy arises because the viewpoint of the picture is close to the soldier." Steadman adds that we are "quite familiar today with foreground objects appearing very large in snapshots. But in 17th-century painting this is rather unusual, and Vermeer's contemporaries would have made human figures in a composition of this kind much more nearly equal in size."

Steadman also draws our attention to the detail of the map hanging on the far wall (maps feature in in a number of Vermeer paintings). It is, he says, "immediately obvious that Vermeer has copied [the map] extremely faithfully." It is possible that Vermeer had copied the map by other means (given the proliferation of lens and mirror instruments in the Netherlands at this time), there are other clues in his painting that suggest a reliance on a camera obscura. Steadman refers to a total of ten Vermeer interiors of which at least half a dozen, including The Music Lesson (1662-65) and Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid (1670-71), share not only the same spatial characteristics but also the same furniture items. Steadman (who tested his original hypothesis by building a scale model of the room and recreating the lighting effects) concludes, "This very curious result can hardly be due to chance." [It is] a consequence of Vermeer using a simple booth-type camera obscura, with which he projected optical images onto the back wall of his room. His canvases are the same size as these images, because he has traced them."

The Frick Collection, New York

Artwork Images

1730-34

Piazza San Marco, Venice

Artist: Canaletto

Canaletto painted the definitive views of eighteenth-century Venice. The Harvard Museum writes, "The Basilica of Saint Mark, with its Byzantine architecture, and the imposing bell tower dominate the scene as symbols of the rich history of the Venetian Republic. Canaletto adjusts for the trapezoidal shape of the piazza by reinforcing the perspective created by the ornamental marble pattern of stone pavement that had recently been laid. This painting represents a timeless view of Venice while also capturing a slice of eighteenth-century daily life." Although Canaletto's meticulous paintings were not slavish in their accuracy, they do possess a near photo-realistic quality that many historians have attributed to the use of a camera obscura.

There is no conclusive evidence that the camera obscura was routinely used as an artistic tool during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. However, in 1949, the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice took possession of a sketchbook attributed to Canaletto. The sketchbook was studied by historian Decio Gioseffi, who concluded that Canaletto had used a camera obscura to produce his preliminary pencil and ink sketches. Gioseffi drew on testimonies and documentary evidence, including references to historical texts and letters from art dealers, but also exhaustive examinations of the sketches themselves. Gioseffi arrived at the conclusion that the paintings could only have been achieved using a camera obscura.

Similarly, Steadman, writing for Drawing Matter Journal, superimposed photographs of Venice onto Canaletto's sketches, revealing an almost mathematical match. Taking the analysis a step further, Steadman digitally overlaid the scaled sketches onto Canaletto's paintings using Photoshop and other digital tools, once again yielding highly consistent results. These findings also strongly suggest that Canaletto used a camera obscura to create his sketches and relied on them as precision guides for his large-scale paintings.

Oil on canvas - Harvard Museum, USA

1797

Phantasmagoria

Artist: Étienne-Gaspard Robert

The magic lantern was invented around the mid-seventeenth century. An enclosed box holding a light source that projects an image outward onto an external surface, it was a direct inversion of the camera obscura. The novelty of the magic lantern duly gave rise to the phenomenon of the Phantasmagoria. The Belgian physics teacher, Étienne Gaspard Robert - or "Roberson" to give him his better known stage name - was the most famous Phantasmagoria showmen. He used a set of moveable magic lanterns (on wheels) to create what he called Phantascopes. Historian Simmon Newcomb writes, "Robertson delved almost fanatically into the study of optics and the supernatural, concocting not only novel optical devices but a set of macabre images and stories to be presented by them. Armed with these, he performed his first show at the Pavillon de l'Echiquier in Paris on the 23rd of January 1798."

Robertson's shows were highly sophisticated and amounted to more than simple ghoulish apparitions depicted in light. Robertson often turned to famous literary and artistic works for his shows, including Hans Holbein's 1538 Dance of Death woodcuts. Newcomb also describes the following scenario, "A clock strikes midnight: a witch, her nose in a book, raises her arm three times. The moon descends, is placed in front of her, and becomes the color of blood; the witch strikes her wand and cuts it in half. She starts to raise her left hand for the third time; cats, bats, skulls flutter about with fire-wisps. In the middle of a magic circle one reads these words: DEPARTURE FOR THE SABBATH. In comes a woman astride a broom and rising in the air; a demon, incredibly on a broom, and many figures follow. Two monks appear with the cross, then a hermit, for exorcism, and everything disappears."

Although he did not invent the Phantasmagoria show (in 1793, a German, Paul de Philipsthal produced such shows featuring spirits, ghosts in Paris, and later, London), Robertson can take credit for modifying the magic lantern for maximum illusional effect. Indeed, the slides he created for his phantasmagoria were entirely black except for the image to be projected, thereby maximizing their ghostly spectre. Indeed, Robertson, who had in his earlier years aspired to becoming an artist, painted many of his own slides giving them the a truly diabolical appearance. Furthermore, in addition to displaying images on fixed backgrounds (such as a wall) he project them onto smoke and semi-transparent screens. That his ghosts and demons appeared to float in midair was thrilling for audiences.

Paris

1890

The Onion Field, Mersea Island, Essex

Artist: George Davison

Although lesser known than the likes of Henry Fox Talbot and Louis Daguerre, George Davison was one of the most important figures in the development of pictorial photography. His photography was widely exhibited and he was a member of the Camera Club, the Photographic Society, and a founding member of the Linked Ring photographic society, a group dedicated to the advancement of artistic photography. Davidson was an admirer of the Impressionists and sought to use his camera to replicate their "hazy" painterly technique. In 1890, one of his photographs, An Old Farmstead, better known simply as The Onion Field, taken with a pinhole camera - no different from a camera obscura other than the fact it captured the image on photo-sensitive paper - won a medal at the Photographic Society of Great Britain's annual exhibition.

Davison was the first to see the artistic possibilities of the pinhole camera. However, The Onion Field created great controversy. In its damning review of the image, The British Journal of Photography wrote, "This photograph will probably be the battlefield for the two conflicting sections of photographic art which the progress of time has brought so prominently forward. The battle was between those who championed 'straight' photography and those who explored a more impressionistic aesthetic - often summed up as 'fuzzy' photography. [...] Photography has so many good artistic capabilities that it is to be regretted that works like this one should prevail, which evincing much, very much, so artistic in conception, should be, as we think, jeopardised by so marked a departure from the accepted outcome of photographic research."

The Times, however, saw things differently, "Perhaps no more beautiful landscapes have ever been produced by photographic methods than Mr. Davison's Old Farmstead and Breezy Corner, to the former of which a medal has been given. In this one especially atmospheric effect is admirably rendered, and, looked at from a suitable distance, the picture gives a wonderfully true rendering of the subject, combining in large proportions the broad effect resulting from skilful artistic treatment with the actual truth in detail of a photograph." In 1889, George Eastman invited Davison to become a director of the London branch of the Eastman Photographic Materials Company. Sadly, so far as his career was concerned, Davison was a committed Christian Socialist, and his political activism made his position untenable in Eastman's eyes and in 1912 he was forced to leave the company.

George Davison © The Royal Photographic Society Collection

Artwork Images

1999-2000

Twelve Portraits After Ingres in a Uniform Style

Artist: David Hockney

British Pop artist David Hockney and Charles Falco, a professor of optical sciences at the University of Arizona, published Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters in 2001. Their argument was that some of the greatest figures in the pantheon of Western art had worked with the aid of optical devices. Amongst those cited were Vermeer and Caravaggio (camera obscura), and Holbein and Hals (optical projection). Art historian Richard Whiddington wrote, "The science of the Hockney-Falco thesis, as it became known, was countered furiously with more science. Jan van Eyck's mirror was ten times too small, Caravaggio's basement would have been too dim by a factor of 1000, the optics available to Hals or Jean-Honoré Fragonard were too crude to achieve all Hockney-Falco proposed."

Having adopted this copying technique himself, Hockney's Twelve Portraits After Ingres in a Uniform Style, were presented at London's National Gallery's exhibition Encounters: New Art from Old, in 2000. The twelve portraits featured National Gallery security attendants in their uniforms. The portraits were drawn from life in Hockney's London studio in a single session, lasting between three and five hours, and with the aid of a camera lucida. The camera lucida, a direct descendent of the camera obscura, was able to achieve its effects in full daylight. Featuring a simple prism and an adjustable stand, the artist simply looks down through the prism and directly traces the projected image on paper.

Hockney had been inspired to undertake this project having viewed a collection of drawings by the great French Neoclassicist Jean-Auguste-Dominique-Ingres (recently exhibited at the National Gallery). He had arrived at the conclusion that Ingres's drawings of facial features were perfect, while his body proportions were, by comparison, misaligned. Hockney concluded that Ingres must have drawn the facial features with the aid of a camera lucida. Hockney bought a camera lucida of his own and copied Ingres's technique by tracing the facial features of his sitters, but painting their bodily proportions freehand. Given that the museum guards would often be seated or standing near their own portraits, visitors were given the unusual opportunity to reflect on the accuracy of the paintings' likenesses for themselves, and to reflect, perhaps, on Hockney's controversial hypothesis.

Pencil, crayon and gouache using a camera lucida

Artwork Images

2019

View of Catskill Mountains, New York, February 6-7, 2019

Artist: Shi Guorui

The Chinese-American artist Shi Guorui is recognized internationally for a series of giant panoramas. These include titles such as: Great Wall of China (2002), Shanghai (2004), Mount Everest (2005), New York's Times Square (2008), and Bird's and Hong Kong (2015). In keeping with these projects, Guorui's 2019 exhibition, Ab/Sense-Pre/Sense, held at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site, featured huge black and white landscapes created using a giant custom-built camera obscura. Credited with launching America's first major art and landscape movement, the famous Hudson River School, Thomas Cole had been one of a small number of Western artists Guorui had been allowed to study at his art school in China.

Guorui set up his camera obscura in a forest near Kaaterskill Falls (in the Hudson River Valley). Light passed into the room/tent through a small aperture, projecting a pure, unfiltered, image directly onto huge sheets of light-sensitive photographic paper. The resultant Gelatin silver prints offered a depth of field that the human eye could not otherwise register with near and far details in equally sharp focus. Shi Guorui called these haunting black and white landscapes "faithful portraits of pure light and time."

Guorui was inspired equally by Cole's paintings and writings, especially his 1836 proto-environmentalist treatise, "Essay on American Scenery". He chose to work with the camera obscura principally because of the way it slows down time and is thereby able to "recapture and reproduce historical thoughts, opinions, feelings, or memories." For Guorui, indeed, his camera obscura - with exposure times of up to thirty-four hours - was the perfect riposte to the pace of modern society and a digital age where literally hundreds of millions of images are uploaded to social media platforms every day. Elizabeth B. Jacks, Executive Director of the Thomas Cole National Historic Site, stated, "This ambitious and dynamic photographic project offers new ways to see and consider the landscapes that inspired Thomas Cole. Guorui is not only connecting 1825 with 2019 but also the traditions of landscape art from ancient China to contemporary America."

Unique camera obscura gelatin silver print

Beginnings

Early Developments

The principle of the camera obscura is so simple some theories suggest Paleolithic cave paintings may have been inspired by projections emitted by pinhole images displayed within enclosed tents (made of animal skins). However, the first known writings on pinhole projections, and theories of light linearity, emerged around the fourth and fifth centuries BCE.

Completed sometime between the third century BC and the sixth century AD, Aristotle (or, rather, ideas attributed to him) raised questions about light and optics in his work Problems (a corpus of thirty-eight books addressed to a total of 900 "problems" arising from meteorology, ethical and intellectual virtues, and the human body). He had observed that a partial eclipse of the sun could be viewed safely when projected onto the ground through the holes in a sieve and through gaps between leaves on the tree. In the late fifth/early fourth century BC, the Chinese philosopher Mozi (Mo-tzu) documented his observations on inverted images formed by light passing through a pinhole. He noted that while light travels in a straight line, if some of the rays reflected from a bright subject pass through a small hole (aperture), they become reversed (or, upside down). Mozi described the space in which to observe this phenomenon as a "treasure room."

In the tenth-century AD, Yu Chao-Lung experimented with projected images to study how light behaves, and employed model pagodas to create pinhole images on a screen. Around the same time, the renowned mathematician and astronomer of the Islamic Golden Age, Ibn al-Haytham, known in the west as Alhazen, published his Book of Optics (1012). In it he introduced the term "Al-Bayt al-Muthlim", or "dark room" when translated into English. His experiments involved the study of a half-moon shape of the sun's image during eclipses which he observed on the wall opposite a small hole made from a window shutter. In his essay "On the form of the Eclipse" he wrote, "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 next significant development came in the late fifteenth/early sixteenth century, when Leonardo da Vinci published his twelve-volume, Codex Atlanticus (1478-1518). In it, he outlined the principle of a camera obscura when he wrote: "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." Leonardo sketched out his findings, but the first formal illustration of a camera obscura - although still not named as such - has been attributed to the Dutch physician, mathematician and instrument maker, Gemma Frisius who featured an image of such a contraption in his 1545 book, De Radio Astronomica et Geometrica.

Towards a camera obscura

The term "camera obscura" was introduced by the famed German polymath Johannes Kepler. He had conceptualized a theoretical model of the eye based on the fundamental principles of a box-like camera obscura in his 1604 treatise on optics, Ad Vitellionem paralipomena quibus astronomiae pars optica traditur. From this date forward, the focus of the development of the camera obscura shifted steadily toward portable box models. Historian Wolfgang Lefèvre wrote, "What cannot be questioned is the fascination that the camera obscura exerted on Europeans in the 17^th century. [...] Among the testimonies to this fascination is a famous letter [Dutch poet, scientist and diplomat Constantijn] Huygens wrote from London in 1622, where he had the chance to experiment with the image produced by [Dutch engineer and inventor] Cornelis Drebbel's camera obscura: 'It is not possible to describe for you the beauty of it in words: all painting is dead in comparison, for here is life itself, or something more noble, if only it did not lack words. Figure, contour, and movement come together naturally therein, in a way that is altogether pleasing'."

This historical reference highlights a fundamental issue with the camera obscura as a drawing tool: most sixteenth and seventeenth-century writings on the subject were directed not to artists at all, but to intellectuals, students or curious minds seeking to understand the basic principles of perspective. Since perspective addresses the problem of representing three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface, the camera obscura helped reveal visual phenomena within the linear-perspective framework that would otherwise have been be imperceptible to the naked eye. For this reason, it is unsurprising that the camera obscura was widely documented as a tool for cartography, city planning, and scientific study. The camera obscura was, however, largely overlooked as an aid to artistic practice. Huygens had picked up on this anomaly in his 1620 autobiography when he wrote: "I cannot but wonder by what negligence on the part of our painters it happens that so pleasant and useful an aid in their work should so far have been neglected by them or been unknown to them."

The proliferation of new designs has led some historians to infer that there was a spike in demand for the device as a tool for drawing from nature. In 1711, for instance, Dutch mathematician and natural philosopher Willem Jacob's Gravesande described a specialized sedan chair with opaque walls and an interior drawing table. The roof featured an aperture that allowed light to enter, projecting an image onto the table. This model was designed for the primary purpose of sketching from nature. Other models emerged during this period, although these were variations on either the transportable room or the portable box camera.

Dutch Golden Age

Some art historians have cited Rembrant in demonstrating a connection between the golden age of Dutch painting (1600 to 1672) and the use of the camera obscura and/or other optical aids such as lenses and mirrors. The debate was revisited in 2016 when, as the Smithsonian Magazine reported, two British scholars published their findings in a new paper for the Journal of Optics. In analyzing Rembrandt's iconic 1660 self-portrait, they recreated projection setups to examine technical accuracy such as facial proportions, and the subtlety of his lighting effects. As Smithsonian states, "They demonstrate that Rembrandt could have used optical equipment like mirrors, camera obscuras and lenses to project images of his subjects onto papers and canvas" and it was "not possible", but "probable", that Rembrandt's work benefitted from these aids.

This line of argument is lent greater weight when one factors in the painting of Rembrandt's most gifted student Carel Fabritius. Fabritius's interest in pictorial space led him to experiment with a camera obscura combined with a double concave lens that enabled him to produce a convincing illusion of an interior or exterior space with the inside of the box painted in a way that, when viewed through a small peep hole, gave a convincing illusion of a three-dimensional space. Fabritius joined the Delft Painters' Guild (the Guild of St. Luke) whose other members included Johannes Vermeer, Nicolaes Maes, and Pieter de Hooch. It seems inconceivable that Fabritius (whose life was cut short by an explosion which also destroyed much of his artwork and notes) would not have spent time, nor exchanged ideas, with his fellow artists. Given his masterful use of light, and his sublime command of linear perspective, Vermeer, of all the Dutch masters (there is not dispute about Fabritius's experiments with optical aids) has attracted the most intense speculation about the use of the camera obscura.

Vermeer specialist, Adelheid Rech, has commented on this topic. She writes, "it has been suggested that Vermeer developed an interest in optics through a connection with the painter Carel Fabritius, who moved to Delft in about 1650; or, via Fabritius, with his friend Van Hoogstraten of Dordrecht. Both men were fascinated by the trompe-l'oeil and perspective illusion. In any case, the reflected image of the camera obscura, no matter how novel it may have appeared in the seventeenth century, was probably a bit more familiar to the Dutch people who were used to living in a world of reflections, constantly seeing their houses, trees and skies mirrored in canals and lakes."

Concepts and Styles

The introduction of lenses and mirrors

In 1568, a Venetian nobleman, and acknowledged expert on Roman architecture, named Daniele Barbaro, wrote in his book La pratica della perspettiva, that the camera obscura should be used for the explicit purpose of producing drawings in "correct perspective" and for making copies of maps. He advised that "no light enters the camera except through the lens," and by moving the paper forward and backward the technical drawer could trace the image in the sharpest possible detail. He wrote, "There on the paper you will see the whole view as it really is, with its distances, its colors and shadows and motion, the clouds, the water twinkling, the birds flying. By holding the paper steady you can trace the whole perspective with a pen, shade it and delicately color it from nature." Barbaro proposed that the diameter of the lens should be narrowed toward its middle as a way of creating a much sharper, more luminous, image. He had thereby discovered the diaphragm. As historian Jonathan Janson writes, "Following Barabaro's improvements of the lens, diaphragm and focusing mechanism, many writers began to recommend the camera as an aid to artists."

In 1585, meanwhile, Italian mathematician and physicist Giovanni Battista Benedetti proposed the use of a mirror angled at forty-five degrees to the direction of the light coming from the lens in order to right the inverted image (in the sixteenth century mirrors were no more than polished metal plates). However, it would be about another century before a camera obscura, which comprised a lens, a mirror, and the screen onto which the image was projected, was fitted inside a portable wooden box. German physicist and mathematician Gasper Schott described a portable camera obscura in his Magia Universalis in 1657, and in 1669, British philosopher Robert Boyle produced a drawn landscape using a portable camera obscura in his paper "Of The Systematical And Cosmical Qualities Of Things".

The portable camera obscura, fitted with a lens, mirror, and translucent screen became the standard model from the late seventeenth century forward. Indeed, the box camera obscura was essentially a photographic camera minus light sensitive film or plate. The lens/mirror based camera obscura was especially popular with draftsmen who traced views to be sold to tourist. English polymath Robert Hooke built different types of box camera obscuras for making illustrations for travel guides. In 1685, German author Johann Zahn designed what is thought to be the first camera obscura that could be manually focused by adjusting the lens (rather than move the screen forward or backward).

Circles of Confusion and Halations

In the projection of a camera obscura, when strong light reflects off interior surfaces such as glass, silk, or any polished surface, an optical peculiarity is produced. Known as circles (or disks) of confusion, they appear as small, slightly out-of-focus, scattering of dots, also known as halations. A central focus of the argument regarding whether or not Vermeer used a camera obscura is his pointillé technique which closely mirrors the circles of confusion effect. Since this phenomenon does not occur in normal human vision, the appearance of such circles in Vermeer's works indicates the likely use of pinhole imagery.

A camera obscura has only a fixed area of sharp focus and the further an object is from this focal point, the less detail it retains. In addition to this loss of detail, Vermeer's rooms display "circles of confusion". In this regard, Philip Steadman's 2005 study, "Allegory, Realism, and Vermeer's Use of the Camera Obscura", presents a particularly compelling analysis. Steadman reconstructed the dimensions and viewpoints of his interiors. After establishing the room's layout, he analyzed the individual works, positioning each piece of furniture in its corresponding location on the room's floor plan. He then used the dimensions of the canvases to estimate the projected image size to ascertain whether Vermeer had used the aid of a camera obscura. By comparing the positions and proportions of the furniture across different paintings, he found that the measurements were consistent enough to suggest evidence of optical assistance.

Steadman writes, "it is significant that there are several passages where Vermeer seems to paint in very soft focus, as in his little portrait of the Girl with a Red Hat." Here Steadman picks up on the lion's head (in the bottom right of the frame) which was a common decorative feature on chairs. He writes, "Notice the sculpted lions' heads, which we know from other paintings are decorations on the backs of chairs. Vermeer has a very characteristic way of showing highlights on reflective surfaces like pottery, polished wood or - in this case - polished brass. In reality a highlight takes the shape of the light source that it reflects. Since Vermeer is painting indoors, the sources of light would be the windows; and so the resulting highlights would in reality be rectangular in shape, perhaps distorted into four-sided shapes with curved edges where they are formed on curved surfaces. Here, however, Vermeer has tended to paint the highlights on the lions' heads as true circles. It has been suggested that what he is doing is imitating accidental effects of slightly unfocussed optical images."

The camera obscura and artistic integrity

Constantijn Huygens, having enthusiastically recommended the camera obscura to the Delft artists, recounted that the "enigmatic Dutch painter" Johannes Torrentius, had feigned ignorance about the device, which Huygens claimed was at the root of the "convincing quality" of his still lifes (he reached this assessment having observed that Torrentius's portraits were, in Huygens's words, "so shamelessly primitive that connoisseurs hardly consider them worth a glance"). Huygens had touched on the taboo of copying and artistic integrity that would pass down through the centuries.

Sir Joshua Reynolds and Benjamin West were amongst the leading history and portrait artists of the eighteenth century. Reynolds and West (both Royal Academians), were, like Huygens, fascinated by the camera obscura. Reynolds was the owner of a miniaturized camera obscura (now on display at London's Science Museum) which he had had crafted to take on the appearance, when collapsed, of a large book. By the late 1770s he and West, who owned a similar model, had, in the words of Belletrist Horace Walpole (a writer, connoisseur, collector, letter-writer, and aesthete who was regarded as one of the most brilliant men of his generation) "gone mad" with the gadget.

By this time, camera obscuras were being widely advertised in the press. In 1819 the London Magazine, for example, carried an advertisement called "Improved Camera Obscura, For the instruction of Youth in the Art of Drawing & Coloring." It featured an illustration of a young man with a box camera obscura on a table drawing a woman sitting in a chair. The accompanying text reads: "By this Instrument, persons unacquainted with Drawing, are enabled to take an exact likeness of anything they desire. By these means Mr. [Benjamin] West, the Historical painter became possessed of his splendid talents." However, for Reynolds (and presumably, West) the camera obscura should not replace the creative vision of the artist. In his famous Discourse XIII, one of a series of lectures on art history and theory to Royal Academy students in the late eighteenth century, he argued that the slavish devotion to detail (that which was on hand with the aid of a camera obscura) merely reduced art to an act of imitation. he stated:

"If we suppose a view of nature represented with all the truth of the camera obscura, and the same scene represented by a great Artist, how little and mean will the one appear in comparison of the other, where no superiority is supposed from the choice of the subject. The scene shall be the same, the difference only will be in the manner in which it is presented to the eye. With what additional superiority then will the same Artist appear when he has the power of selecting his materials, as well as elevating his style? Like Nicolas Poussin, he transports us to the environs of ancient Rome, with all the objects which a literary education makes so precious and interesting to man: or, like Sebastian Bourdon, he leads us to the dark antiquity of the Pyramids of Egypt or, like Claude Lorrain, he conducts us to the tranquillity of Arcadian scenes and fairy land."

The connection between optical and artistic innovations was raised much later by David Hockney, with optics scientist Charles Falco, in their 2001 book Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters. Hockney, an artist of great repute himself, caused controversy when he indirectly questioned the myth of the "divinely gifted" Old Master whose genius revealed itself in sublime eye and hand co-ordination. As art critic Andrew Marr summarized, "Hockney extends his argument to many great painters, arguing that there was a whole tradition of lens and mirror aids in painting, which was forgotten when photography arrived, and painters lost interest in imitating nature. This explains the eerie photographic-like realism of Bellini's Doge of Venice and Holbein portraits. It explains why Renaissance portraiture abounds in left-handed people (the reverse effect, before artists learnt to correct it with mirrors). And it explains the historically sudden mastery of complex perspective and 'naturalness'."

Later Developments

The Magic Lantern: The Projected Image

The magic lantern is an inversion, or the obverse, of the camera obscura. An enclosed box holding a light source (a candle or paraffin lamp) projects a drawn image outward, usually onto a wall or sheet (but sometimes onto smoke). However, the origin of the magic lantern dates all the way back to the first shadow shows where fire was used as a light source to create shadows on cave walls. The Chinese and Japanese made Magic Mirrors - highly polished bronze disks that allowed light from a concentrated source to be reflected, via the disks, onto a screen to create an image (usually of the Buddha) - from around in fifth century AD. In 1420, Giovanni de Fontana published Liber Instrumentorum. It featured an illustration of a man holding a lantern near a wall onto which was projected a picture of the devil with the intention of terrifying onlookers. At this point, the lantern would have had no lens, meaning the image would have been somewhat blurry.

The invention of the magic lantern proper occurred around the mid-seventeenth century and has been attributed variously to German polymath Athanasius Kircher, Dutch polymath Christiaan Huygens, and Danish mathematician Thomas Rasmussen Walgensten. In 1646 Kircher published his treatise on the nature of light, lenses, mirrors, sundials, and astrology, "Ars magna lucis et umbrae". In it he drew a box housing an oil or paraffin lamp, with a chimney that evacuated the smoke. He pictured an optical tube to magnify the size of a projected image, painted on glass, and which is illuminated by the light source. Huygens had developed a working lantern by November 1659, while Walgensten was the first person to use the term "Laterna Magica." It was Walgensten, indeed, who seized on the commercial possibilities of the lantern and toured Europe giving lantern exhibitions.

In 1668, the English scientist Robert Hooke published an article in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, in which he wrote: "[the Laterna Magica] produces Effects not only very delightful, but to such as know the contrivance, very wonderful; so that Spectators, not well versed in Optics, that could see the various Apparitions and Disappearances, the Motions, Changes and Actions, that may this way be presented, would readily believe them super-natural and miraculous." The Magic Lantern Society (MLS) takes up the story from the eighteenth century when it explains, "hundreds of people were involved in the development of the lantern and its accessories. As lenses, mirrors and especially light sources improved, projectionists could provide shows to larger audiences outside the home or laboratory."

Phantasmagoria

In the late eighteenth century several showmen used the lantern to produce horror shows. These were known as "Phantasmagoria". Often the lantern or lanterns (some fitted with wheels) was/were placed behind a translucent screen, out of the view of the audience. This greatly added to the mystery and excitement of the show. The most famous (if not the first) Phantasmagoria showman was a Belgian, Étienne Gaspard Robert, known better by his stage name, Robertson. He used a customized lantern on wheels, which he called a Phantascope, to create stories that "brought to life" the worlds of demons and ghouls. By moving the lantern/projector backwards and forwards Robertson could rapidly alter the size of the images on the screen (much like a modern zoom lens). His devices were very cleverly designed to keep the picture in focus and at a constant brightness as the lanterns moved back and forth.

In the early nineteenth century, touring showmen, who were known as 'Galantee' or 'Savoyards', gave magic lantern displays featuring biblical stories, projected onto walls or white sheets, mostly for the education of children. As magic lanterns became cheaper, the Galantee showmen gave way to the "Professors"; a name given to showmen who had access to more sophisticated equipment and wider range of animated slides. Some of the most complex and spectacular lantern shows were presented at the Royal Polytechnic Institution in London. The MLS writes, "The screens at the Polytechnic were about 25 feet (8 metres) across, musicians accompanied the shows, and a team of sound effects people were assembled behind the screen. The projectionists often used four, five or six large-format projectors to present their fabulous shows of spectacular dissolving views. [...] Improvements in light sources brought changes in the style of shows. The development of Oxy-hydrogen limelight and Arc light made it possible for projectionists to create huge images and elaborate effects in front of large audiences."

In the 1880s and 1890s over thirty firms were engaged in the production of lanterns and slides in London alone. On 28 December 1895 Louis and August Lumière gave their first public showing of the Cinématographe at the Grand Cafe, Boulevard des Capucines, Paris. This was the birth of cinema and it nullified the popularity of the magic lantern, even if reports of its terminal demise were exaggerated. Indeed, by the mid-twentieth century the magic lantern had evolved into the 35mm slide projector, the most popular of which was the Kodak Carousel.

The Camera Lucida

In 1806, Sir William Hyde Wollaston patented a device called "Camera Lucida" (Latin for "light chamber", or "well lit room"). Wollaston's device featured a simple prism and an adjustable stand. When an artist looks down through the device's prism, they are able to directly trace the projected image onto paper. The camera lucida was a direct descendant of the camera obscura in that it could carry out the same function of the latter but was able to do so in full daylight (rather than in a dark shroud or roomed enclosure). By the early/mid-1800s, ownership of camera lucidas was widespread. In Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters, Hockney argued that the device was likely used as an aid in some of the most admired portrait drawings of the nineteenth century, including those of great French Neoclassical master, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres.

Ingres was steeped in the academic tradition, and a staunch defender of the rules governing artistic excellence. Being a history painter, Ingres placed less importance on portraiture, but he is today recognized as a master of both genres. Hockney singled out Ingres because his portrait drawings, which he had recently studied at the National Gallery, were so realistic, he surmised, they were most likely have been made with the assistance of a camera lucida. As Marr observed "Hockney's new thinking on how a cascade of the greatest names in Western art - including Caravaggio, Raphael, Frans Hals, Vermeer, Diego Velázquez and Ingres - used lenses to trace out their pictures. That was how they achieved their near-miraculous use of perspective; that was how they caught transient smiles with such a swagger."

Given Ingres's imperious position in the timeline of Western art, Hockney's argument was audacious at best, inflammatory at worst. Hockney then decided to test his theory using a camera lucida to create portraits of his own. The result was a series featuring a dozen security guards at the National Gallery, titled Twelve Portraits After Ingres in a Uniform Style (1999-2000). To underline his argument, Hockney recreated the "miraculous" faces of his sitters with the aid of a camera lucida, and their "less-than miraculous" bodies with his freehand (just as Ingres had).

The Pinhole Camera

The pinhole camera postdated the invention, in 1839, of the Daguerreotype camera, the first form of mechanical reproduction to produce a finely detailed and permanent photographic record; and, a year later, William Fox-Talbot's "sensitive paper"-based Calotype process that allowed for mass-reproduction of the photographed image. Unlike the Daguerreotype and the Calotype models, the pinhole camera (a term coined by the Scottish scientist, Sir David Brewster) was a more direct descendent of the camera obscura. The pinhole camera projected its image onto paper coated in photographic emulsions, and thereby creating a permanent photographic impression. But given that it eschewed any kind of lens attachment, the pinhole camera lacked the picture sharpness of image of its more sophisticated, and more popular, counterparts.

In 1890, George Davison produced a pinhole photograph called, An Old Farmstead (aka, The Onion Field), which was awarded top prize at the Photographic Society of Great Britain's annual exhibition. Although the impressionistic, or "foggy", image divided opinion, it created new artistic interest in the pinhole technique. As photography historian Corine Hormann writes, "This particular picture was the beginning of the popularity of the pinhole camera, which lasted for several years. Consequently, some American companies also put pinhole cameras on the market, as well as a special pinhole disc that could replace the lens of a regular camera."

Photographers continued to experiment with pinhole cameras, but by the early twentith century, mass-produced photographic equipment meant that pinhole photography became a niche artistic calling (although to this day pinhole cameras are used by educators to teach the basic principles of photography). However, some contemporary artists, most notably, perhaps, Chinese-American Shi Guorui, have used a pinhole camera to capture sweeping cityscapes and natural vistas including images of Ground Zero in New York, urban sprawl in the American West, and sites of Chinese development and environmental encroachment. Shi Guorui is intent on creating a "blurry monochrome aesthetic" that he says lends his images a sense of timelessness. For him, moreover, the need for huge exposure times (up to thirty-five hours in some cases) is akin to a meditative process that he put down to surviving a near fatal road accident. "I wanted to choose a method that is completely suited to my interior landscape. So my body, my thinking, all mesh with this kind of method."

Useful Resources on Camera Obscura