The Darkened Room

Photography is one of my things.  I've been shooting since college days, and while most of my work - photos and negs, not to mention my equipment, was stolen with my car some years ago, I've been getting back into it lately.

Some of the work will probably make its way here eventually - and while the digital camera is very easy, I do miss the science and art of the darkroom. So many hours spent inside with the little red light, mixing chemicals, and then waiting for the film to process and the print making as unworthy print after print went into the trash.

Of course, not all early "photography" involved darkrooms - or at least, what we now think of darkrooms.  One of the oldest, and oddest, yet strangely attractive, of these is the camera obscura.

The term is latin for "darkened room," which makes sense when one considers exactly how the camera obscura works.  Cameras, as mechanisms, really perform a simple operation.  They have some system of allowing a pinhole of light to shine on a surface - usually a light sensitive photographic plate that captures that light - and the image of the world that comes with it.

As the National Geographic reported a few years ago, Aristotle wrote about this method - minus the actual camera and photographic plate.  So did Leonardo DiVinci - being DiVinci, he drew diagrams as well.  But they both, and may others in between as well, described how a small hole letting light into a darkened room could project the image of the outside world onto the walls of that room.

Nice, non-DiVinci woodcut showing how a camera obscura works.

The images are what we think of as upside down - building spires and tree tops of a city skyline point toward the floor - as does the same image we see with our eyes - because of the way light is reflected.  The situation with our eyes is that our brains process the images so that the sky is up and the ground is down.  But since the camera obscura image is unprocessed, it remains reversed:

Central Park by Abelardo Morell (www.abelardomorell.net)

In the days before photographic plates were invented, artists and sometimes party-goers (the camera obscura was a great novelty) would line the walls of the room with tracing paper and record the projected image that way (that is what the gentleman in the above woodcut is doing).  Portable versions were built as well, but they couldn't quite provide the "wow" factor of stepping into an image-filled room.

Umm... No.

Because of that "wow" factor, cameras obscura actually became an early tourist attraction, springing up in scenic locations like mountains and seasides.

Santa Monica, California's camera obscura was a semi-bargain at ten cents a visit.

The outdoors, filling the indoors in an unusual way, gives the image captured inside a meditative, dream-like quality that isn't present in today's typical photograpy.  As Abelardo Morrell states in the National Geographic article, ""I want to refresh how people see the world".

Can't find the credit for this one.

More Morell

Morell again with the outside images projected on paintings by Hopper on the left and not sure, maybe Roy Lichtenstein, on the right.

Nice use of the camera obscura and conventional photography

Another version of mixing photography and the camera obscura to get a dreamlike feel.  Credit for both images here.

And because of its unique nature, it seems somehow natural that the term camera obscura would become the name of an indie band - and a pretty good one, too.  Not really anything to do with photography - but music is another of my things, so let's end today with some music!

Enjoy!