Daguerre’s Photography

Abstract

The camera obscura (dark chamber) was the precursor of and inspiration for the photographic camera, and it might also be thought of as the antecedent of television because it displays a real-time real image on a screen. In one version the camera obscura was a dark room in which people looked at images of the outside world cast on one of its walls using pinhole optics that produced an upside down, backward, and dim image. Any effort to increase brightness by enlarging the pinhole makes the image blurry. The camera obscura was first described in print in Caesarianos’ early sixteenth-century translation of the Treatise on Architecture by Roman engineer and architect Marcus Vitruvius Pollio (circa 90–20 BCE), but it should be noted that the optical imaging properties of a small hole were probably known centuries before (Hecht 1993, entry 3). A major development was the replacement of the pinhole with a lens, as suggested by Giovanni Battista Della Porta, who also proposed using it as a tool for painting, in his Magic Naturalis, published in 1558 (Hecht 1993, entry 8).