Poster no. 1

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Poster no. 1

back into workshop next week, creating Borne with Russell and eight other brilliant performer/storytellers… — at Young Centre for the Performing Arts.

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Did photography start with a hole in the cave wall?

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Quick Thought… Camera Obscura

Actor: Thomas Gough

Actor: Thomas Gough

The discovery of the ‘camera obscura’ that provides an image of a scene is very old, dating back to ancient China. Leonardo da Vinci mentions natural camera obscuras that are formed by dark caves on the edge of a sunlit valley. A hole in the cave wall will act as a pinhole camera and project a laterally reversed, upside down image on a piece of paper. So the invention of photography was really concerned with finding a means to fix and retain the image in the camera obscura.

This in fact occurred first using the reproduction of images without a camera when Thomas Wedgwood, from the famous family of potters, obtained copies of paintings on leather using silver salts. As he had no way of fixing them, that is to say to stabilize the image by washing out the non-exposed silver salts, they turned completely black in the light and had to be kept in a dark room for viewing.

Renaissance painters used the camera obscura which, in fact, gives the optical rendering in color that dominates Western Art. The camera obscura literally means “dark chamber” in Latin. It is a box with a hole in it which allows light to go through and create an image onto the piece of paper.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photography