Watching the World in a Dark Room: The Early Modern Camera Obscura

Twenty years ago, as a tourist in Scotland, the wife and I stopped at the Camera Obscura in Edinburgh. Very cool. It was periscope-like — projecting a circular image down onto a circular table beneath. As you panned the periscope around the image too rotated such that you had to work yourself around the table to keep the horizon "level" — relatively speaking.

A few months ago, in Edinburgh again on vacation, and it looks like they turned what was a quaint oddity into a whole "family experience" with all kinds of other things for kids and such. I passed on it this time.

I lived in a squat for a while and the shower was a makeshift… well hose tied to the ceiling. Thats not important. There was no light, so showers took place in the dark. There was a tiny hole in the buildings’ outer wall and it would project this magnificently ‘photographic’ image on the wall. It was just an amazing, super ‘poetic’ view of a parking lot. I swear I saw film grain in there somehow…it was prolly the structure of the wall

Camera obscura were probably used by some painters in Europe as far back as the 1500s. Evidence is sparse but there are some telltale signs that are the result of characteristic distortions from the mechanism. For decades, art historians have been having very vigorous debates as to who might have been using them. Vermeer is suspected to have done so and even da Vinci and Hans Holbein are sometimes proposed.

Abelardo Morell took an incredibly cool picture of Times Square that's projected onto the walls of a hotel room via a camera obscura. Well worth a look:

https://aperture.org/prints/camera-obscura-image-of-times-sq...

And here's a video of someone experimenting with a Tudor era camera obscura to do a portrait:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9cd8X2UNt4

There is a Camera obscura scene in the AMC (?) Snowpiercer tv series, I forget which episode. It's what the tailies used for movie time