Lightbox

About

A lightbox is a shallow case with a translucent face lit from behind, so an image or pattern glows as though it were its own source of light. Glowing transparencies are older than electricity: in the 18th century Carmontelle painted long scrolls to be wound past a lit window, and Louis Daguerre's Diorama in Paris (1822) transformed huge painted scenes by shifting the light behind them.

Advertising made the backlit sign part of city life, down to the enormous Kodak Colorama that hung in New York's Grand Central Terminal from 1950. Jeff Wall borrowed that commercial glow for staged photographs from the late 1970s. Other artists treat the box as a material. Mark Khaisman layers translucent packing tape into film-noir scenes, Emily Allchurch presents digital collages after Old Master paintings as backlit transparencies, and Brian Eno has made lightboxes whose colours slowly and endlessly recombine.