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Camera Obscura

Author: Leonardo Da Vinci
Year: 1502 Edit Add
Book: Remediation

André Bazin (1980) expressed this view with untroubled certainty: "The decisive moment [in Western painting] undoubtedly came with the discovery of the first scientific and already, in a sense, mechanical systems of reproduction, namely, perspective: the camera obscura of da Vinci foreshadowed the camera of Niepce. The artist was now in a position to create the illusion of three-dimensional space within which things appeared to exist as our eyes in reality see them" (239). Photography was a mechanical and chemical process, whose automatic character seemed to many to complete the earlier trend to conceal both the process and the artist.

Source type: picture
Info: The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci - An experiment, showing how objects transmit their images or pictures, intersecting within the eye in the crystalline humour, is seen when by some small round hole penetrate the images of illuminated objects into a very dark chamber.
Original size: 644x596 px. Edit

Camera Obscura

Author: Nicéphore Niépce
Year: 1826 Edit Add
Book: Remediation

André Bazin (1980) expressed this view with untroubled certainty: "The decisive moment [in Western painting] undoubtedly came with the discovery of the first scientific and already, in a sense, mechanical systems of reproduction, namely, perspective: the camera obscura of da Vinci foreshadowed the camera of Niepce. The artist was now in a position to create the illusion of three-dimensional space within which things appeared to exist as our eyes in reality see them" (239). Photography was a mechanical and chemical process, whose automatic character seemed to many to complete the earlier trend to conceal both the process and the artist.

Source type: picture
Info: The work of Joseph Nicéphore Niépce
Original size: 738x648 px. Edit