The Camera Obscura And Its Impact On Society

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For my Research paper, I have studied how the ‘Camera Obscura’ was created and its impact on society. The reason I have chosen to discuss this topic is because it baffles me that an image can be created without using man made technology. An image could be simply made by a small crack in a cave, projecting an image of the outside, inside. The first use of light to create an image is the camera obscura. The name, ‘camera obscura’, was created by Johannes Kepler a German astronomer, in the early 17th century. He made it using a tent to observe the solar eclipse. The word ‘camera obscura’ means ‘dark chamber’.

The camera obscura is an optical device, known to be used since the times of Mozi and Aristotle. The earliest declaration of this type of device was by the Chinese theorist Mo-Ti, in the 5th Century BC, calling it ‘the locked treasure room’. The first published illustration of the camera obscura, is in a book from 1544 called ‘De radio astronomica et geometrica’, by Dutch scientist Reiner Gemma Frisius. He used it to observe a solar eclipse at Louvain. The camera obscura is a completely dark box or a room with a small hole in one wall. The light rays from outside the camera obscura, passes through the hole and produces an inverted image within the chamber of whatever is in front of the hole. As light travels in a straight line, the reflection of a lit object passes through the tiny hole, but does not scatter, it crosses and reforms as an upturned image on a flat surface. The camera obscura was a major deal as it created an image in true perspective. It creates the three-dimensional world we live in onto a “two-dimensional surface in a mathematically precise fashion” (Myers, A 2013).

Before the camera obscura was used for p...

... middle of paper ...

... obscura had required. We still use the convex lens, aperture and exposures.

Nostalgically today the camera obscura is having a revival of interest, around the globe the camera obscura is seen as a historical treasure. Artists such as Abelardo Morell are experimenting with this vintage medium. Abelardo Morell created his first camera obscura in his own living room in 1991. He blacked out all the windows with black plastic to keep all the light out and cut a small hole in the curtains for the aperture. After this photograph, Morell has been across the world taking stunning photographs with this technique. In the beginning, he used a large format camera and took exposures of up to five to ten hours, but recently he has changed to digital. He takes these photographs because he loves seeing the “weird and natural marriage of the inside and outside” (Morell, A 2013)

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