Summary:
Photography is much older than Fox Talbot and Daguerre. A look at the earliest investigations into the nature of light and the way it forms images. Includes investigations from BC China and Greece, 11th century Arabia, and Leonardo da Vinci.

Details or Sample:
Dark Room by Mick Saunders

Look, it´s uncle John in all his glory, paddling in the tide; trouser legs up past his knees and a knotted handkerchief keeping the sun off his head. And there, aunt Flo paddling, her frock’s hem tucked pantaloon style into her knickers. It doesn’t matter whether we use an old box Brownie or the latest super-duper digital gear, the photograph albums and piles of pictures in old shoeboxes have the events recorded for posterity, reminding us of past joys; but not a thought for the millennia of work that gave us photography.

Millennia?

Well yes, millennia, the philosopher, Mo Ti (China, 500 BC) commented on the pinhole phenomenon. He observed that light travels in straight lines and that when it passed through a pinhole into a darkened room it casts an inverted image on to a screen, the earliest description of the camera obscura. There are no further existing Chinese texts relating to the pinhole effect until the 9th century AD. Tuan Cheng refers to observing an image on a pagoda wall; and in the 10th century, Yu Chao-Lung used a model pagoda to make pinhole images.

About a century after Mo Ti, Alexander the Great’s tutor, Aristotle, questioned the nature of light: ‘Why is it that when the sun passes through quadrilaterals, as for instance in wickerwork, it does not produce a figure rectangular in shape but circular?’ (Problems, Book XV, 6).

All right, Mo Ti, Aristotle, and others, couldn’t record photographic images for posterity, they just (just?) observed, questioned, and notated the nature of light and optics.

Purchase this content for your website...

Pricing:
Usage:	$15	[Add to Cart]

Downloads: 1
Written by: Mick Saunders
Available File Types:Text
Words: 475