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5.1 1839 and all that

5.3 The Camera Obscura

The design of the Camera Obscura used by Fox-Talbot in his early experiments had remained unchanged for over two hundred years since Johann Kepler replaced the pinhole with a lens, other than to have become portable (Lefèvre, 2007, p.59). The early seventeenth century was a period of considerable interest in and

experimentation with optics. In 1604 the mathematician Johannes Kepler described the science of the Camera Obscura and coined the name at the same time he replaced the pinhole with a lens (Shapiro, 2008). Helmut Gernsheim in A Concise History of Photography describes the transition at this time of the Camera Obscura from a room size structure large enough to accommodate a man, to portable handheld devices. Gernsheim informs us that, “the earliest reflex camera was described and illustrated by Johann Christoph Sturm, professor of mathematics at Altdorf, Switzerland, in 1676.” He describes the flurry of activity taking place throughout Europe to miniaturise the Camera Obscura.

The Camera Obscura had been used not only as a drawing aid but as an optical viewing device for centuries.

With the improvements in the quality and size of lenses in the early seventeenth century, there followed the development of handheld portable devices. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Camera Obscura became a fashionable

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accessory for those who participated in the new pastime of tourism, particularly those taking the Grand Tour28. The Camera Obscura was used not only as a drawing aid for

sketching the spectacular landscapes and historic architecture but crucially, as an aesthetic viewing/framing device.

The act of [en]framing a view was considered to be a novel way of mediating the viewing experience. The act embraced an aesthetic that emanated from the

combination of optical mediation and isolation of the scene from its surroundings by the use of a frame. This was surely a precursor to and acknowledgement of an aspect of snapshot photography that would ensure its popularity, by imparting the act of viewing the mundane, with the everyday aesthetic. The aesthetic of the frame and the role of the Camera Obscura as a framing and mediating device do not seem to have been widely explored as an aesthetic concept. Anna Friedberg discusses the aesthetic of the window in relation to framing in a metaphorical context from painting to architecture (Friedberg, 2009a; Friedberg, 2009b)

The Camera Obscura was generally accepted as a device used to translate the

phenomenal space of vision onto the virtual plane of representation. In his treatise on painting, the fifteenth-century architect, sculptor, painter, and theorist Leon Battista Alberti described painting as the construction of an image that resembles a window

28The Grand Tour was the traditional trip of Europe undertaken by mainly upper-class

European young men of means, or those of more humble origin who could find a sponsor. The custom flourished from about 1660 until the advent of large-scale rail transport in the 1840s.

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(Alberti, 1972). The canvas is a frame that delineates the area of vision and concentrates the gaze. William Uricchio observes:

“Alberti's metaphor of the window bears consideration in relation to the camera obscura as a device used to translate the phenomenal space of vision onto the virtual plane of representation” (Friedberg, 2009b, p.88; Uricchio, 1999).

Anne Marsh sees the Camera Obscura as a social apparatus, a theatrical space that captures a vision of the real, linking with Barthes idea of the gaze in photography as a psychic theatricalization a primitive theatre, a kind of Tableaux Vivant (Marsh, 2003, p.96). There can be little doubt that the Camera Obscura paved the way to many of the scopic regimes that dominate contemporary visual culture.

The instrument offered a vision of the world that was isolated by framing and optical mediation, colours and contrast were subtly modified, and vistas were confined by the phenomenon of vignetting, both in terms of darkening and often blurring or aberration. There was also the element of movement, the clouds, the branches of trees, people and things, also the uncanny transposition from the real into the miniaturised moving elements on a flat screen. It is hard to imagine in these days of cinema and video the cognitive impact of such phantasmagoria. The optical illusion of the Camera Obscura paved the way for a new way of seeing, optical technology including microscopes and telescopes introduced the phenomenon of the aperture as a means of visualisation and a way of seeing what had previously been invisible to the naked eye. Optics and the phenomenon of framing, transformation and the way in which we interpreted the real and our perception of the world, whist introducing the notion of prosthesis (Stafford et al., 2001, p.313).

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or fix images, he wrote copious notes, recording his thoughts, less he should forget before returning to England, the ideas that were flooding his mind. He wrote in his diary:

…lest the thoughts should escape me between that time and my return to England, I made careful note of it in writing, and also of such experiments as I thought would be most likely to realize it, if it were possible. And since, according to chemical writers [sic], the nitrate of silver is a substance particularly sensitive to the action of light, I resolve to make a trial of it, in the first instance, whenever occasion permitted on my return to England (Schaaf, 1992, p.37)

It is important to remember these excited words when we later consider the ritualistic socio-cultural practice that personal snapshot photography was to become.

In the spring of 1834, Fox-Talbot started his experimentation with various silver salts. During this time, he worked closely with this friend and fellow scientist, the

astronomer, John Herschel who was also experimenting with a photographic process in relation to astronomy.

For his initial experiments Talbot used leaves and lace pressed against the sensitised paper to create his negative images, Talbot called the resulting negatives sciagraphs – drawings of shadows - a term devised, by Herschel. The silhouette-like images would now be described as photograms (see earlier reference to Wedgwood). The results encouraged him to progress to using a Camera Obscura to focus the view from his window upon the sensitised paper. However, the sensitivity of the process was poor, Talbot writes, “exposure is extended to as long as two hours”, the effect on the paper was not strong enough to exhibit a satisfactory picture of the building as had been hoped. “The outline of the roof and the chimneys, et cetera, against the sky

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... I constructed [a Camera Obscura] out of a large box, the image being thrown upon one end of it by a good object-glass fixed at the opposite end. The apparatus being armed with a sensitive paper was taken out in a summer afternoon and placed about one hundred yards from a building favourably illuminated by the sun. An hour or so afterwards I opened the box and I found depicted upon the paper a very distinct representation of the building, with the exception of those parts of it which lay in the shade.

A little experience in this branch of the art showed me that with a smaller Camera Obscura the effect would be produced in a smaller time. Accordingly, I had several small boxes made, in which I fixed lenses of shorter focus, and with these, I obtained very perfect, but extremely small pictures [...] (Fox-Talbot, 1844a).

In these early days, it would seem that Fox-Talbot’s principal interest was in the science and technology of his process and the use of his photogenic drawing as an alternative to manual sketching. The subjects he recorded were expedient, and he appears, at this time, to have been unconcerned by any aesthetic potential of the new technology as a medium; although he later wrote about the aesthetic of his process in his Pencils of Nature series of books, but this was not until eighteen forty-four (Fox- Talbot, 1844a). Although later, Fox-Talbot recognised the new technology as an art medium with potential as an aesthetic medium as did other photographers such as Julia Margaret Cameron who found the soft textured images created by the Calotype process suited her soft focus artistic approach to photography (Gernsheim, 1948). The Camera Obscura was the avant-la-lettre of photography, as it anticipated the advent of the photographic camera, Michael John Gorman wrote,

The history of early modern techniques of optical projection is frequently told as a prelude to the history of chemical photography and projective technologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The camera obscura was photography’s avant-la- lettre, as the magic lantern anticipated the slide and film projectors (Gorman, 2007, p.31).

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Gernsheim described Johann Zahn’s29 reflex Camera Obscura, described in 1685, as

the prototypes of the nineteenth-century box and reflex camera (Gernsheim & Gernsheim, 1955). Gorman speculated that Zahn’s cameras as an example of the evolution of technology could be seen as, “ready and waiting for photography,” technologies to be, “cannibalised, hacked and patched,” their use subverted from that, intended by their designers (Gorman, 2007, p.31).