C96 Article

dark wonder

anya Kiang explores the history of the camera obscura as a prelude to building one in Dublin.

 

That photography holds a privileged position in the relations between art and science should come as no surprise. Even a cursory glance around any contemporary art institution will confirm that photography has been accepted, or even eagerly embraced, as Art. That said, photographs are also understood to be 'more scientific' than other kinds of image. Their scientific credentials are usually traced to experiments into the chemistry of photosensitive emulsions conducted in the early decades of the 1800s. Considered to be 'gentlemen scholars' rather than 'mad alchemists', figures such as Thomas Wedgewood (son of the famous potter), Humphrey Davy, Fox Talbot, Nicéphore Niepce and Louis Daguerre fit comfortably within the established framework of the history of science, though they were very much engaged in art practice of one kind or another¹.

Be that as it may, the chemical principles on which photography is based tell only half the story. What we now regard as photography is the fruit of not only chemical, but optical research. It is very much a hybrid practice. Across all its institutional bases, it remains grounded in two moments, which photographers often call the 'dry' and the 'wet'. There is the 'dry' moment of taking the picture, and the 'wet' work in the darkroom at a later stage. Though often heralded as a complete revolution in visual culture, digital photography is really only affecting the wet aspect of traditional photographic practice, which is becoming sidelined into a 'craft' role. By contrast, the dry or optical aspect remains integral to digital photography and to our modern and future visual culture. What's more, it is this aspect of photography that goes back to one of the most ancient sciences, the science of light or optics.

 

A cartoon from August 30,1890 Puck magazine; courtesy Wilgus collection		A print from the 1877 Frank Leslie's Popular Monthly showing a scene inside the Central Park camera obscura; courtesy Wilgus collection

 

Optics was once considered the royal road to understanding the natural world: everyone who considered themselves to be Anyone would know their Euclid. Now however, many artists will recall optics as an excruciatingly dull section of physics, full of hopelessly lifeless diagrams featuring arrows, straight lines - and, yippee! some dotted lines for a bit of excitement. This is a pity given that optics can address fundamental questions of particular relevance to art practice, questions which many artists will have posed for themselves.

How is an image formed in a mirror? How does a lens conjure up an image literally out of thin air? Why, when you raise your right hand, does your twin in the mirror raise her left? And, if you can get your head around a mirror-image being left-right reversed, why isn't it upside-down as well, like its cousin from the lens? Rather than the arid lines of optical diagrams, these questions can be explored with the dense, unstable and truly wonderful device from the pre-photographic era, known as the camera obscura.

The camera obscura is based on a simple optical principle: that light passing through an aperture or pinhole into a darkened room will project an inverted image opposite the aperture. This principle was known to the ancients: Aristotle (c 336-323 BC) wrote about it, and the 11th-century Arabian scholar, Alhazan (Ibn al Hassan) described a working model of just such a 'darkened room' which was used over the centuries by astronomers to observe solar eclipses safely.

It was not until the Renaissance that the instrument's potential for artists was developed. Leonardo da Vinci noted that the images there "will actually seem painted upon the paper." He built a small camera obscura in order to test his theories about the workings of the human eye and the concept of perspective. From this point, research into the physiology of visual perception, into art practice, and into optics and natural philosophy coalesced around the camera obscura. It is fair to say that it fired the scientific imagination of the Enlightenment. As Jonathan Crary has argued:

This highly problematic object was far more than simply an optical device. For over two hundred years...it stood as a model, in both empiricist and rationalist thought, of how observation leads to truthful inferences about the world, at the same time the physical incarnation of that model was a widely used means of observing the visible world, an instrument of popular entertainment, of scientific inquiry, and of artistic practice.²

As to its use in artistic practice, research generally concentrates on the development of increasingly portable cameras - and debate centres on who to credit with being the first with technical innovations such as the addition of lenses or a variable aperture. There is also a substantial literature on whether Vermeer used a camera obscura. However, less attention has been paid to its role as a form of popular entertainment, though that, too, has a long history. In the late sixteenth century, the Neapolitan polymath Giovanni Battista della Porta, author of the blockbuster Magica Naturalis, is said to have made a huge camera in which he seated his guests who viewed a performance he had arranged to occur outside. Prefiguring the response to the first cinema projections, the story goes that the sight of the upside-down images caused viewers to panic and flee, and della Porta was later brought before the Inquisition on charges of sorcery.

Such is the manifold nature of the camera obscura that the Inquisition of a different era - the nineteenth century popular press - focused on entirely different aspects of the device - those relating to its voyeurism. Often located in parks or along seaside promenades, camera obscuras were enjoyed by both sexes. Sharing the close, dark space inside, as much as what might have been seen of the outside, was likely responsible for their slightly risqué associations.

 

Camera obscuras were used for training and bombing practice in both World War I and World War II. This photo, stamped "Sep15 1918" and "Committee on Public Information" shows the interior of a portable camera obscura used for aviation testing in World War I. As the projected image of an airplane moved across the table its speed was measured with the metronome seen on a shelf on the left side of the tent. Courtesy Wilgus collection

 

In other contexts, such as Edinburgh, the experience was designed to have a much more edifying effect. Built onto an existing 'popular observatory' in 1852 by Maria Short, the Camera Obscura was bought in 1892 by Patrick Geddes who is best known as the founder of modern town planning. This remarkable individual used the camera to show people life as a whole, and the interaction between town and country. After seeing the camera obscura, re-named the Outlook Tower, visitors would pass to the foyer outside where there were different coloured stained-glass windows with subjects such as 'botany', 'zoology' etc. "Geddes wanted to stop people seeing life only through their own interest, or one colour window, but to grasp the wholeness and interdependency of life. The camera showed the reality - all colours together."³ And like modern-day hippies, after seeing the camera, visitors sat in a darkened room - the Inlook Room - to meditate on what they had seen and to make it their own. No visitor testimony survives from that time, so it is impossible to say if Geddes' lofty goals were met. And while the coloured-glass pictures sound a bit dodgy, his use of the camera obscura was well judged: the sense of connectedness, of a limitless, living visual field being brought before you, remains my enduring memory of a visit.⁴

The Edinburgh Camera Obscura affords you a God-like perspective. After paying an admission charge of a few pounds, you climb up a long spiral stairs, at the top of which a guide ushers you into a room with a domed roof. In the middle, like a low altar, is a round, white table. It's not entirely flat, but curves up at the edges, like a satellite dish. The guide explains the principles at work: light is reflected by an angled mirror in the top of the dome, and passes through a series of lenses, projecting an image of the scene outside onto the table. And sure enough, as the lights are dimmed, live images emerge as if by magic: the city skyline, clouds, birds, Princes Street, cars, shops, people, all in full colour, and yet silent. The silence heightens the visuality of the scene; the colours fade and intensify as clouds pass over the sun. The mirror can swivel and tilt so you can survey the horizon as well as tilt down to look at the people queueing outside the entrance. Emboldened, you can 'play' with the images on a makeshift screen such as a sheet of paper. You lift up struggling shoppers and stray dogs like fried eggs off a pan and let them drop with an inaudible splat. You can make people appear to jump over your fingers; you can have a taxi run over your arm; or catch a bus in the palm of your hand. Or you can indulge in the voyeuristic pleasure/power of tracking unsuspecting citizens as they go about their business...

The camera obscura is certainly a wonder of nature, but of course it is also a constructed experience. Like going to the cinema, you pay your money and you get to see a show. However the experience is qualitatively different to that of other forms of motion picture. As the lights in the camera obscura are turned back up, you see the images fade⁵, but no credits roll, there's no 'the end'. Instead, you realise that the images are still 'there', bustling away on the table top. And they've been there all along, they just need intense darkness to be seen! You realise that daylight, even the relative gloom of a northern town, is so strong that the eye never opens up properly to see things, to let darkness in to do its work.

It is an uncanny, or maybe a strangely comforting realisation.⁶ It makes the experience of a different order to that of looking through a periscope, where the image lurks at the bottom of a tube, or to watching a video where the images are trapped behind the lacy stockingette of a TV screen; and different again to the experience of cinema. Whereas the world of a film erupts into or punctures our quotidian environment, and by virtue of editing can condense or expand narrative time at will, the camera obscura suggests the possibility of an entire dimension, running alongside our own, all the time, in realtime. Like the parallel universe that lies through the wormhole of science fiction, this hidden dimension is only revealed by a hole or aperture, and conditions of darkness. And though we think of darkness simply as the absence of light, and consider a hole as just the absence of matter - which of course they are - they are also much more positive and productive.⁷

The camera obscura belongs to a special class of objects whose power is to liberate wonder, to loosen the shackles of instrumental vision and to promote, in its proper sense, intense speculation.

It is used in this vein by a number of contemporary artists such as Paul Brewer and Jacqueline Griggs who bring travelling cameras to public spaces, where, depending on the practicalities (access to chemicals, etc.) exposures may also be printed up, though essentially this type of work is process-orientated. Moving more into the arena of performance, Peter Richards makes work that is poised on the border between an event and its record. Lindsay Seers literally incorporates a camera obscura (the camera or chamber is the artist's mouth) evoking the undead and the vampyric body. Concern with the corporeality is also evident in Caroline Rye's fascinating Turin Machine. This is a performance installation that traverses the boundary between the live presence and the dead relic, evoking crucial questions of the nature of self-portraiture, female representation, desire and faith.

In the field of straight photography, Abelardo Morrell makes beautiful photographs from inside camera obscuras, often hotel rooms that he has temporarily blacked-out. With a dreamlike quality, the works show simultaneously the interior and exterior, the private space of the bedroom and the public piazza. The photographs are made with exposures as long as eight hours, so the come and go of people or passing traffic does not register. They have a stillness that cannot be confused with stasis. Rather, Morell's work carries a dynamic charge all the more intense because it comes from a single force: the force of gravity. The work dramatises gravity, opening it up to narrative possibilities. If buildings dream, their dreams would surely look like this.

Richard Torchia's installations and live projections also dramatise gravity. In his work, the camera obscura is "an instrument of immanence: a tool for attending to what is at hand and in the present"⁸. This relatively simple goal belies the depth and complexity of Torchia's engagement with a crucial space between seeing and knowing, known as wonder.

Drawing inspiration from these contemporary works, the Gallery of Photography is planning to build a camera obscura on the roof of its current premises. Though the project is still in its infancy - and large questions of funding, planning permission and builders remain, the idea is sound. It is absolutely appropriate to the architecture of the building (which is based on the structure of the box brownie camera), and to the activities that go on inside it. The camera obscura, built alongside a digital lightroom, will function as an optical studio, complementing the chemical darkroom facilities offered in the basement of the building. Such a facility will inform and excite the scientific imagination; it will also provide a space where issues of interest to a wide range of artists - realtime representation, surveillance, the gaze, voyeurism - can be meaningfully explored. In short, the camera obscura will form a kind of image lab for investigating one of the founding sites of our current scopic regime. And, let's not forget, it will be a lot of fun, too.

¹ These researches are also accepted as 'proper' science because the gentlemen involved were at least aware of each others' work (Talbot and Niepce collaborated), although their findings were often cloaked in secrecy to safeguard possible patents and commercial rights. This would distinguish their work from the isolated experiments of the German Johann Schulze in 1725 or of Carl Wilhelm Scheele in Sweden. That sharing and openness is a hallmark of the scientific enterprise is given a delightful twist by the work of a Frenchman, Jean Hellot, on covert communications. In 1737 Hellot proposed a method of secret writing by photochemical methods. Using weak silver nitrate solution as ink, words written by dim light would remain invisible until exposed to light for a few hours. (And we thought it all started with Enid Blyton and lemon juice!)

² Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: on Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, MIT Press, 1991.

³ Andrew Johnson and Claire Alexander, Maria Short/Patrick Geddes and the Outlook Tower, information published by the Edinburgh Camera Obscura, n.d.

⁴ A breathless advertisement sign for the camera obscura in Bristol reads, "[it] has a magical effect - the movement of persons, animals and carriages, the waving of foliage and the coming and going of ships being brought in the picture with the distinction and vivid colouring of nature and affording a high gratification to the observer from the continual changes and varying effects of light and shade upon the landscape." The very structure of the sentence mimics the experience of connectedness and presence.

⁵ Verses occasion'd by the sight of a Camera Obscura, printed in 1747, ends:

"Enough, now ope' the door, see sol's bright ray

Breaks in, the sickening figures faint away

And all the beauties fade, sunk in the flood of day"

The poem was used to market a camera obscura made by John Cott, Optical Instrument Maker. Quoted in Erika von Erhardt-Siebold, Some inventions of the pre-romantic period, Englische Studien, vol. LXVI, 1931-2.

⁶ You get a similar shiver up the spine when you consider that retinal images form just as readily in the eyes of the dead as in those of the living...

⁷ For another discussion of productive absences, see Malin Starrett's fascinating DIY science of coloured shadows, Source, vol. 26 Spring 2001.

⁸ Richard Torchia, The Waving of Foliage and the Coming and Going of Ships, exhibition catalogue from the Encounters series, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, 1997.

Tanya Kiang is Director of the Gallery of Photography, Dublin, and a former editor of CIRCA.