Camera Obscura

About

A camera obscura, Latin for 'dark room', is a sealed space or box with a small hole in one wall. Light passing through throws an inverted image of the scene outside onto the opposite surface. Ancient Chinese and Greek writers described the effect, and Ibn al-Haytham analysed it in the 11th century.

By the 17th and 18th centuries portable boxes fitted with lenses and mirrors helped artists trace views; Canaletto is generally thought to have used one, and scholars still argue over whether Johannes Vermeer did. Fixing that projected image chemically is what the first photographers achieved in the 1820s and 1830s. Contemporary artists use the device at architectural scale. Abelardo Morell blacks out rooms and photographs the upside-down city spread across beds and walls; Vera Lutter exposes photographic paper inside room-sized cameras for hours or days, so passers-by vanish and buildings appear in reversed tones.