A Brief History of Photography by Punkinhed7 Creative Commons Sunday January 16, 2011 506 views | 0 comments Filed in Historical & Sci Fi

You may not realize it, students, but the art, and science that we know today as photgraphy has its roots with our early anscestors. Around 70,000 years ago, in what is today South Africa, the earliest human art on record was created.

These designs, while perhaps primitive by today's standards, are the first evidence that we have suggesting the human capacity for abstract thought.

Abstraction, the process by which one arrives at abstract thought, is, my students, the ability to take the information gathered from your surroundings--things you can sense with your eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and fingers--and use it to find connections that may have otherwise not been apparent. At some point in your lives, I'm sure someone has told you to, "Think outside the box." This common phrase is an instruction used to promote abstract thinking.

The next big step that we have identified on humanity's road to capturing eternal images of our world happened between 35,000 and 45,000 years ago in Southern Germany, with this exquisite carving of a woman made out of mammoth-ivory.

Known as the Venus of Fels Cave, this anatomically correct figurine is the earliest example that has been identified of the human capacity for representational art--creating things to look like, or represent, objects or people in the world around us.

I'll take it from here! I can see back in time from my art gallery!

Here we have an artist's interpretation of the cave paintings at Chauvet, France. Extensive and extremely detailed, these paintings date to between 15,000 and 30,000 years ago.

The significance of these paintings cannot be emphasized enough. They are the oldest known example of the human ability to recreate what we see in pictorial format.

This painting depicts Hassan ibn Hassan, also known as Alhazen, an Iraqi physicist and mathematician that lived about a thousand years ago.

A brilliant mind, Alhazen provided us with the first written account of what is known today as the camera obscura, or 'dark room' in Latin. The concept of which is very similar to that used in the modern practice of pinhole photography.

By creating a very small hole in the outside wall of a darkened room, Alhazen found that an image of the sun was projected onto the opposite wall. As the eclipse progressed, a crescent-shaped shadow gradually covered the sun.

Alhazen cleverly devised a method for safely viewing a solar eclipse (STARING DIRECTLY AT THE SUN IS A BAD IDEA).

By the time that the Italian Renaissance came around, knowledge of the camera obscura had become widespread, and many prominent thinkers, such as Leonardo da Vinci, had written about its potential applications. Additionally, it was now known that the device could project images of scenes or objects, not just the sun.

During the same period, another scientific gentleman, Giovanni Battista della Porta, described the addition of a mirror positioned at a 45 degree angle to the inside of the camera obscura. This allowed an image to be projected downwards onto a flat sheet of paper where it could be easily traced. From this point on, the camera became an instrument not just of science, but of art.

An example of this can be seen in the masterpiece, "The Art of Painting," by Johannes Vermeer, dating from 1666. In this, and many of his other works, Vermeer utilized the camera obscura to achieve levels of detail previously unknown in the world of painting.

Hooke

Facilitated by the advances made during the 17th century in both the theory and practice of optics (the study of the behavior and properties of light), scientists such as Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle, and Johannes Zahn affected many improvements to the design of the camera obscura. These included: miniaturization to allow portability, the addition of a glass viewing screen to aide in composition, a viewing hood to prevent stray light from clouding the image, and an adjustable lens tube to enable focusing.

Boyle

Zahn

This diagram by Zahn, from 1685, illustates many of the technological advances made during that era.