The Camera Obscura
Home Back to Photos Back to Material Culture
No one really knows when the first person thought of the concept of capturing an image permanently, but it was certainly an ancient idea. The camera obscura (meaning "dark chamber") is first mentioned by Aristotle in his work called Problems, written about 330 BC. Through the ages, the camera obscura was used by philosophers (scientists) to study light, and by artists as an aide in painting. It was not initially a small box, but rather a small room which was in all operation a pinhole camera. A canvas could be stretched on the room's back wall while the image of the subject on the outside was projected through a small hole and upon the cloth. The artist could then sketch the subject quickly and this negated the need for someone to sit for hours on end while the artist painted.
In 1609, Johannes Kepler suggested improving the camera obscura by adding a lens. This improvement meant that more detail could be drawn and painted due to the sharpening of the image. This was the first major step in the evolution of the camera. Eventually, the camera obcura began to shrink to more manageable sizes. By the late 1700s, many were about one cubic foot. Depicted below is a camera obscura from the 1700s. Inside is mounted a mirror that reflects the image onto a frosted plate of glass that serves as the top of the camera. Since the image is projected upside down and backwards, the mirror would reverse the projection so that the image appearing on the glass would have the correct orientation. The artist would then put a sheet of paper over the glass and trace the image. This greatly decreased the time to sketch and also increased accuracy of the image drawn.
But still, there was no way to capture the actual image.