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Three Excerpts from The Camera Obscura and Its Subject, Chapter 2 of the book Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century by Jonathan Crary, MIT Press, 1991

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Excerpt One

It has been known for at least two thousand years that when light passes through a small hole into a dark, enclosed interior, an inverted image will appear on the wall opposite the hole. Thinkers as remote from each other as Euclid, Aristotle, Alhazen, Roger Bacon, Leonardo, and Kepler noted this phenomenon and speculated in various ways how it might or might not be analogous to the functioning of human vision. The long history of such observations has yet to be written and is far removed from the aims and limited scope of this chapter.

It is important, however, to make a distinction between the enduring empirical fact that an image can be produced in this way and the camera obscura as a historically constructed artefact. For the camera obscura was not simply an inert and neutral piece of equipment or a set of technical premises to be tinkered with and improved over the years; rather, it was embedded in a much larger and denser organisation of knowledge and of the observing subject. Historically speaking, we must recognise how for nearly two hundred years, from the late 1500s to the end of the 1700s, the structural and optical principles of the camera obscura coalesced into a dominant paradigm through which was described the status and possibilities of an observer. [1]

I emphasise that this paradigm was dominant though obviously not exclusive. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the camera obscure was without question the most widely used model for explaining human vision, and for representing the relation of a perceiver and the position of a knowing subject to an external world. This highly problematic object was far more than simply an optical device. For over two hundred years it subsisted as a philosophical metaphor, a model in the science of physical optics, and was also a technical apparatus used in a large range of cultural activities. For two centuries it stood as model, in both rationalist and empiricist thought, of how observation leads to truthful inferences about the world at the same time the physical incarnation of that model was a widely used means of observing the visible world, an instrument of popular entertainment, of scientific inquiry, and of artistic practice. The formal operation of a camera obscura as an abstract diagram may remain constant, but the function of the device or metaphor within an actual social or discursive field has fluctuated decisively. The fate of the camera obscure paradigm in the nineteenth century is a case in point. [2] In the texts of Marx, Bergson, Freud, and others the very apparatus that a century earlier was the site of truth becomes a model for procedures and forces that conceal, invent, and mystify truth. [3]

1. The extensive literature on the camera obscure is summarised in Aaron Scharf, Art and Photography (Harmondsworth, 1974), and in Lawrence Gowing, Vermeer (New York, 1952). General studies not mentioned in those works are Moritz von Rohr, Zur Entwicklung der Dunkeln Kammer (Berlin, 1925), and John J. Hammond, The Camera Obscura: A Chronicle (Bristol, 1981).

For valuable information on the uses of the camera obscura in the eighteenth century, see Helmuth Fritzsche, Bernardo Beloao genannt Canaletto (Magdeburg, 1936) pp. 158-194, and Decio Gioseffi, Canaletto; n quaderno delle Gallerie Veneziane e l'impiego della camera ottica (Trieste, 1959).

Works on the artistic use of the camera obscura in the seventeenth century include Charles Seymour, Jr., "Dark Chamber and Light-Filled room: Vermeer and the Camera Obscura," Art Bulletin 46, no. 3 (September 1964), pp. 323-331; Daniel A. Fink. "Vermeer's Use of the Camera Obscura: A Comparative Study, "Art Bulletin 53, no. 4 (December 1971), pp. 493-505;A Hyatt Mayor, "The Photographic Eye," Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 5, no. 1 (Summer 1946), pp. 1526; Heinrich Schwarz, "Vermeer and the Camera Obscura," Pantheon 24 (May-June 1966), pp. 170-180; Arthur K. Wheelock, Perspective, Optics, and Delft Artists Around 1650 (New York, 1977); and Joel Snyder, "Picturing Vision," Critical inquiry 6 (Spring 1980), pp. 499526.

2. Cf. Colin Murray Turbayne, The Myth of Metaphor (New Haven, 1962), esp. pp. 154158, 203-208, which poses the camera obscure as a completely historical concept linked with representative or copy theories of perception from antiquity to the present. An equally historical discussion of the structure of modern photography and of the Cartesian camera obscure is Arthur Danto, "The Representational Character of Ideas and the Problem of the External World," in Descartes: Critical and Interpretative Essays, Ed. Michael Hooker (Baltimore, 1978), pp. 287-298.

3. Karl Marx, The German Ideology, Ed. C. J. Arthur (New York, 1970), p.47; Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory [1896] trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (New York, 1988), pp. 3739; Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (New York).

Excerpt 2

At the same time one must be wary of conflating the meanings and effects of the camera obscura with techniques of linear perspective. Obviously the two are related, but it must be stressed that the camera obscura defines the position of an interiorised observer to an exterior world, not just to a two dimensional representation, as is the case with perspective. Thus the camera . obscura is synonymous with a much broader kind of subject-effect; it is about far more than the relation of an observer to a certain procedure of picture making. Many contemporary accounts of the camera obscura single out as its most impressive feature its representation of movement. Observers frequently spoke with astonishment of the flickering images within the camera of pedestrians in motion or branches moving in the wind as being more lifelike than the original objects.[l2] Thus the phenomenological differences between the experience of a perspectival construction and the projection of the camera obscura are not even comparable. What is crucial about the camera obscura is its relation of the observer to the undemarcated, undifferentiated expanse of the world outside, and how its apparatus makes an orderly cut or delimitation of that field allowing it to be viewed, without sacrificing the vitality of its being. But the movement and temporality so evident in the camera obscura were always prior to the act of representation; movement and time could be seen and experienced, but never represented.[13]

12. See, for example, Robert Smith, Compleat System of Opticks (Cambridge, 1738), p. 384, end John Harris, Lexicon Technicum, p. 40.

13. Classical science in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries extracted "individual realities from the complex continuum which nourished them and gave them shape, made them manageable, even intelligible, but always transformed them in essence. Cut off from those precarious aspects of phenomena that can only be called their "becoming," that is, their aleatory and transformative adventure in time including their often extreme-sensitivity to secondary, tertiary, stochastic, or merely invisible processes, and cut off as well from their effective capacities to affect or determine in their turn effects at the heart of these same processes the science of nature has excluded time and rendered itself incapable of thinking change or novelty in and for itself" Sanford Kwinter, Immanence and Event (forthcoming).

Excerpt 3.

Beginning in the late 1500s the figure of the camera obscura begins to assume a pre-eminent importance in delimiting and defining the relations between observer and world. Within several decades the camera obscura is no longer one of many instruments or visual options but instead the compulsory site from which vision can be conceived or represented. Above all it indicates the appearance of a new model of subjectivity, the hegemony of a new subject-effect.

First of all the camera obscura performs an operation of individuation; that is, it necessarily defines an observer as isolated, enclosed, or autonomous within its dark confines. It impels a kind of askesis, or withdrawal from the world, in order to regulate and purify one's relation to the manifold contents of the now "exterior" world. Thus the camera obscura is inseparable from a certain metaphysic of inferiority: it is a figure for both the observer who is nominally a free sovereign individual and a privatised subject confined in a quasi-domestic space, cut off from a public exterior world. [29] (Jacques Lacan has noted that Bishop Berkeley and others wrote about visual representations as if they were private property.) [30]

At the same time, another related and equally decisive function of the camera was to sunder the act of seeing from the physical body of the observer, to decorporealise vision. The monadic viewpoint of the individual is authenticated and legitimised by the camera obscura, but the observer's physical and sensory experience is supplanted by the relations between a mechanical apparatus and a pre-given world of objective truth. Nietzsche summarises this kind of thought: "The senses deceive, reason corrects the errors; consequently, one concluded, reason is the road to the constant; the least sensual ideas must be closest to the 'true world.' It is from the senses that most misfortunes come they are deceivers, deluders, destroyers." [3l]

29. Georg Lukacs describes this type of artificially isolated individual in History and Class Consciousness, pp. 135-138. See also the excellent discussion of inwardness and sexual privatisation in the seventeenth century in Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection (London, 1984), pp. 9-69.

30 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1978), p. 81.

31. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p. 317. 32. Sir Isaac Newton, Opticks: Treatise on the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections and Colours of Light, 4th Ed. (1730; rpt. New York, 1952), p. 26. 33 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Ed. Alexander Campbell Fraser (New York, 1959), 1, ii, 15. On some of the epistemological implications of Newton's work, see Stephen Toulmin, "The Inwardness of Mental Life," Critical Inquiry (Autumn 1979), pp. 1-16.

Among the well-known texts in which we find the image of the camera obscura and of its interiorised and disembodied subject are Newton's Opticks (1704) and Locke's Essay on Human Understanding (1690). What they jointly demonstrate is how the camera obscura was a model simultaneously for the observation of empirical phenomena and for reflective introspection and self-observation. The site of Newton's inductive procedures throughout his text is the camera obscura; it is the ground on which his knowledge is made possible. Near the beginning of the Opticks he recounts:

"In a very dark Chamber, at a round hole, about one third Part of an Inch, broad, made in the shut of a window, I placed a glass prism, whereby the Beam of the Sun's Light, which came in at that Hole, might be refracted upwards toward the opposite wall of the chamber, and there form a coloured image of the Sun." [32]

But between these two locations (a point and a plane) is an indeterminate extensive space in which an observer is ambiguously situated. Unlike a perspectival construction, which also presumed to represent an objectively ordered representation, the camera obscura did not dictate a restricted site or area from which the image presents its full coherence and consistency. [34] On one hand the observer is disjunct from the pure operation of the device and is there as a disembodied witness to a mechanical and transcendental re-presentation of the objectivity of the world. On the other hand, however, his or her presence in the camera implies a spatial and temporal simultaneity of human subjectivity and objective apparatus.

Thus the spectator is a more free-floating inhabitant of the darkness, a marginal supplementary presence independent of the machinery of representations. Foucault demonstrated in his analysis of Velasquez's (?) Meninas, it is a question of a subject incapable of self-representation as both subject and object. [35] The camera obscura a priori prevents the observer from seeing his or her position as part of the representation. The body then is a problem the camera could never solve except by marginalizing it into a phantom in order to establish a space of reason. [36] In a sense, the camera obscura is a precarious figurative resolution of what Edmund Husserl defined as the major philosophical problem of the seventeenth century: "How a philosophising which seeks its ultimate foundations in the subjective . . . can claim an objectively 'true' and metaphysically transcendent validity." [37]

Perhaps the most famous image of the camera obscura is in Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690):

"External and internal sensations are the only passages that I can find of knowledge to the understanding. These alone, as far as I can discover, are the windows by which light is let into this dark room. For, methinks, the understanding is not much unlike a closet wholly shut from light, with only some little opening left . . . to let in external visible resemblances, or some idea of things without; would the pictures coming into such a dark room but stay there and lie so orderly as to be found upon occasion it would very much resemble the understanding of a man. "[35]

35. Foucault, The Order of Things, pp.3-16. See also Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago, 1982), p. 25.

36. On Galileo, Descartes, and "the occultation of the enunciating subject in discursive activity," see Timothy J. Reiss, The Discourse of Modernism (Ithaca, 1982), pp. 38-43.

37. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Science and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston, 111., 1970), p. 81.

An important feature of Locke's text here is how the metaphor of the dark room effectively distances us from the apparatus he describes. As part of his general project of introspection Locke proposes a means of visualising spatially the operations of the intellect. He makes explicit what was implied in Newton's account of his activity in his dark chamber: the eye of the observer is completely separate from the apparatus that allows the entrance and formation of "pictures" or "resemblances." Hume also insisted on a similar relation of distance: "The operations of the mind ...must be apprehended in an instant by a superior penetration, derived from nature and improved by habit and reflection." [39]

Elsewhere in Locke's text another meaning is given to the idea of the room, of what it literally meant in seventeenth-century England to be in camera, that is, within the chambers of a judge or person of title. Locke writes that sensations are conveyed "from without to their audience in the brain, the mind's presence room, as I may so call it." [40] In addition to structuring the act of observation as the process by which something is observed by a subject, Locke also gives a new juridical role to the observer within the camera obscura. Thus he modifies the receptive and neutral function of the apparatus by specifying a more self-legislative and authoritative function: the camera obscura allows the subject to guarantee and police the correspondence between exterior world and interior representation and to exclude anything disorderly or unruly. Reflective introspection overlaps with a regime of self discipline.

It is in this context that Richard Rorty asserts that Locke and Descartes describe an observer fundamentally different from anything in Greek and medieval thought. For Rorty, the achievement of these two thinkers was "the conception of the human mind as an inner space in which both pains and clear and distinct ideas passed in review before an Inner Eye.... The novelty was the notion of a single inner space in which bodily and perceptual sensations ...were objects of quasi-observation." [40]

In this sense Locke can be linked with Descartes. In the Second Meditation, Descartes asserts that "perception, or the action by which we perceive, is not a vision ...but is solely an inspection by the mind." [42] He goes on to challenge the notion that one knows the world by means of eyesight: "It is possible that I do not even have eyes with which to see anything." [43] For Descartes, one knows the world "uniquely by perception of the mind," and the secure positioning of the self within an empty interior space is a precondition for knowing the outer world. The space of the camera obscura, its enclosedness, its darkness, its separation from an exterior, incarnate Descartes' "I will now shut my eyes, I shall stop my ears, I shall disregard my senses." [44] The orderly and calculable penetration of light rays through the single opening of the camera corresponds to the flooding of the mind by the light of reason, not the potentially dangerous dazzlement of the senses by the light of the sun.

38. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II, xi, 17.

39. David Hume, An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748; New York, 1955), p. 16 (emphasis mine). A similar set up is noted in Descartes by Maurice Merleau Ponty, where space is a "network of relations between objects such as would be seen by a witness to my vision or by a geometer looking over it and reconstructing it from the outside." Eye and Mind: The Primacy of Perception, Ed. James M. Edie (Evanston, Ill., 1964), p. 178. Jacques Lacan discusses Cartesian thought in terms of the formula "I see myself seeing myself," in Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, pp. 80-81.

40. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II, iii, 1.

41. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, 1979), pp. 49-50. For an opposing view, see John W. Yolton, Perceptual Acquaintance from Descartes to Reid (Minneapolis, 1984), pp. 222 - 223.

42. Rene Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 2 vole., trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge, 1984), vol. 2, p. 21.

43. Descartes, Philosophical Writings, vol. 2, p. 21. 44. Descartes, Philosophical Writings, vol. 2, p 24. 45. My discussion of Vermeer clearly does not engage any of the extensive art historical speculation about his possible use of the camera obscura in the making of his pictures (see references in footnote 1). Did he in fact use one, and if so, how did it affect the makeup of his paintings? While these are interesting questions for specialists, I am not concerned here with the answers one way or the other. Such investigations tend to reduce the problem of the camera obscura to one of optical effects and ultimately painterly style.

I contend that the camera obscura must be understood in terms of how it defined the position and possibilities of an observing subject; it was not simply a pictorial or stylistic option, one choice among others for a neutral and historical subject. Even if Vermeer never touched the mechanical apparatus of the camera obscura and other factors explain his halation of highlights and accentuated perspective, his paintings are nonetheless profoundly embedded in the larger epistemological model of the camera.

There are two paintings by Vermeer in which the paradigm of the Cartesian camera obscura is lucidly represented. [45] Consider The Geographer (left) and the Astronomer (and it may well be the same man in each painting)

   

The sombre isolation of these meditative scholars within their walled interiors is not in the least an obstacle to apprehending the world outside, for the division between interiorised subject and exterior world is a pre-given condition of knowledge about the latter The paintings then are a consummate demonstration of the reconciling function of the camera obscura: its interior is the interface between Descartes' absolutely dissimilar res cogitans and res extensa, between observer and world. [46]

The camera, or room, is the site within which an orderly projection of the world, of extended substance, is made available for inspection by the mind. The production of the camera is always a projection onto a two dimensional surface maps, globes, charts, and images. Each of the thinkers, in a rapt stillness, ponders that crucial feature of the world, its extension, so mysteriously unlike the unextended immediacy of their own thoughts yet rendered intelligible to mind by the clarity of these representations, by their magnitudinal relations.

Rather than opposed by the objects of their study, the earth and the heavens, the geographer and the astronomer engage in a common enterprise of observing aspects of a single indivisible exterior. [47] Both of them are figures for a primal and sovereign inwardness, for the autonomous individual ego that has appropriated to itself the capacity for intellectually mastering the infinite existence of bodies in space.

Descartes' description of the camera obscura in his La dioptrique ( 1637) contains some unusual features. Initially he makes a conventional analogy between the eye and the camera obscura:

"Suppose a chamber is shut up apart from a single hole, and a glass lens is placed in front of this hole with a white sheet stretched at a certain distance behind it so the light coming from objects outside forms images on the sheet. Now it is said that the room represents the eye; the hole the pupil; the lens the crystalline humour...."[48]

"...cut away the three surrounding membranes at the back so as to expose a large part of the humour without spilling any.... No light must enter this room except what comes through this eye, all of whose parts you know to be entirely transparent. Having done this, if you look at the white sheet you will see there, not perhaps without pleasure and wonder, a picture representing in natural perspective all the objects outside." [49]

46. The affinity between Vermeer and Cartesian thought is discussed in Michel Serres, La Traduction (Paris, 1974), pp. 189-196.

47. Descartes rejected the scholastic distinction between a sublunary or terrestrial world and a qualitatively different celestial realm in his Principles of Philosophy, first published in Holland in 1644 "Similarly, the earth and the heavens are composed of one and the same matter; and there cannot be a plurality of worlds." The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 1, p. 232. Cf Arthur K. Wheelock, Vermeer (New York, 1988), Abrams, p. 108. 48. Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 1, p. 166; Oeurres Philosophiques, vol. 1, pp. 686-687. 49. Descartes, The Philosophical Writings, vol. 1, p. 166.

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Russell Naughton 1998

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