

Written by Paolo De Angelis
Photography and film have transformed how we capture and share visual experiences. Both mediums emerged in the 19th century. Both were driven by advances in optics and chemistry, and developed through key technological breakthroughs and artistic movements. Photography began as the science of fixing images from a rudimentary camera onto light-sensitive materials. Cinema evolved by projecting a rapid sequence of photographic images to create the illusion of motion. Over time, photography and film have continually influenced one another, from the earliest motion studies by photographers to cinematic techniques inspiring still-image composition. This series traces the origins of both mediums, highlighting major milestones such as the daguerreotype and calotype processes. It examines stylistic and artistic movements and considers their cultural significance and interplay. The early innovations in image creation and projection set the stage for contemporary photography and visual media. Prior to the camera's invention, methods such as shadowgraphy, the camera obscura, the magic lantern, and the camera lucida allowed individuals to capture or display images by utilising light and shadow. Each of these techniques has distinct technological roots and historical contexts, contributing uniquely to the advancement of photography and visual representation. We will examine each method in detail, covering its operation, key contributors to its development, and its artistic and cultural importance.
Shadowgraphy
Shadowgraphy refers to the creation of images using shadows. At its core, an object is positioned between a light source and a surface, thereby casting a shadow that outlines the object’s shape. The underlying science is simple. Light travels in straight lines, and any solid object will obstruct light, resulting in a silhouetted shadow. This concept forms the basis of shadow play, where cut-out figures or hands generate moving silhouettes. No specialised lenses or advanced optics are necessary. It needs only a point of light and a subject. This makes shadowgraphy one of the oldest techniques for image creation. People have likely been captivated by shadows since prehistoric times. The first projections were probably the shadows cast on cave walls by firelight. Over the years, various cultures created shadow-based storytelling. By the 1st millennium BCE, shadow puppet theatre began to emerge, possibly originating in India around 200 BCE, and is well-documented in Indonesia and China. In these traditions, flat leather or paper puppets, featuring intricate cutouts, are positioned in front of a lamp to display moving silhouettes on a semi-transparent screen. These were often enhanced with colour for visual effect. Shadow puppetry spread westward throughout the Ottoman Empire, reaching Europe by the 17th century. By the late 18th century, shadow theatres gained immense popularity in France. Audiences were entertained by dynamic scenes and narratives performed entirely through shadows.
Concurrently, silhouette portraiture began to flourish in Europe during the 18th century. A silhouette portrait essentially outlines a person's profile. It is typically filled with a solid dark shape against a light background. This art form was named after Étienne de Silhouette, a French finance minister known for his hobby of cutting paper shadow portraits. Because creating a silhouette required fewer materials and less skill compared to oil painting, the phrase à la Silhouette became synonymous with on the cheap, highlighting its appeal as a budget-friendly portrait alternative. Artists would trace a person’s profile, a shadow cast by candlelight onto paper, and then cut it out to create a likeness. These silhouettes represented an early method of capturing an individual’s appearance through light and shadow, albeit in a manual fashion. Shadow puppetry does not have a single inventor. It is filled with cultural icons. For instance, the folklore surrounding Chinese shadow theatre credits its creation to figures from the Han dynasty. In Europe, the entertainer Félicien Trewey became known for popularising hand shadows as a form of magical entertainment during the 19th century. Augustin Edouart, a prominent French silhouette cutter, created thousands of profile portraits, contributing significantly to the preservation of shadow imagery within Western culture.
Shadowgraphy is considered a precursor to photography due to its focus on light and shadows to form images. The earliest photography endeavours were essentially shadow pictures. In the early 19th century, innovators like Thomas Wedgewood and Humphry Davy explored creating images with light-sensitive chemicals. In 1802, they announced a technique for copying painted glass images and producing profiles or silhouettes by exposing silver nitrate-coated materials to light. Wedgewood successfully made temporary white-on-black silhouette images of objects by exposing treated paper to sunlight, known today as photograms. These shadowgraphs, while made permanent in principle, lacked a method to fix the image, resulting in complete darkening over time. His shadow image photograms, despite their fleeting nature due to further light exposure, earned him recognition as possibly the first photographer conceptually.
During the 1830s, William Henry Fox Talbot expanded this concept by creating photograms known as photogenic drawings. He would lay objects such as leaves or lace directly on paper treated with salt and silver and expose them to sunlight. This resulted in a distinct white silhouette of the object against a dark background, essentially capturing nature’s shadow on paper. He was fascinated that the images were drawn by light itself and illustrated how effective this method was in recording even the intricate details of transparent items like plant specimens. Talbot’s early achievements with photogenic drawing, prior to refining camera-based photography, highlight that recording shadows was the most straightforward form of photography at the time. Notably, upon the public announcement of photography in 1839, Talbot openly acknowledged that his paper method was still better suited for recording the shadows of plant specimens, lace, or similar flat objects by direct contact than for camera images. This reinforces the idea that the earliest practical photographs were shadowgraphs.
Shadowgraphy, across its many forms, connects art and science. Shadow plays served as a cultural precursor to cinema, creating moving images to narrate stories long before the advent of film. In the cultures that embraced these practices, they fulfilled spiritual and educational purposes, encompassing everything from folk tales to moral teachings. Silhouette art made portraiture accessible, enabling middle-class individuals to acquire likenesses when painted portraits were prohibitively expensive. Shadowgraphy imparted a crucial lesson to early image-makers in photography, in that light, along with its absence, can create lasting images. It is no surprise that a well-known 19th-century description of photography was the art of fixing a shadow, a phrase that elegantly ties shadowgraphy’s legacy to the emerging art of photography.
Camera Obscura
The term camera obscura is derived from Latin, meaning dark chamber. Essentially, it is an optical device that casts an image of its surroundings onto a wall or screen. The concept is straightforward. When a small aperture is created on a wall of a dark room or box, light rays from the outside enter through the hole and form an inverted image on an internal surface. This occurs because light travels in straight lines. Rays originating from the top of an object move downward through the hole. Rays from the bottom travel upward, resulting in an upside-down image. The projected image maintains the colour and perspective of the original, though it appears dim. A smaller pinhole can create a sharper image, according to principles of geometric optics, but extremely small holes cause diffraction blur. In practice, later versions of the camera obscura incorporated a convex lens at the aperture to enhance brightness and focus, permitting a larger opening without loss of sharpness. Mirrors were additionally used to invert or redirect the image to a horizontal viewing surface. These improvements enhanced the camera obscura, making it a more effective imaging tool.
The camera obscura phenomenon has been recognised for over two thousand years. The earliest documented description originates from the Chinese philosopher Mozi around 400 BCE, who noted that a pinhole creates an inverted image. In the Western world, Aristotle observed a similar occurrence during a solar eclipse: sunlight filtering through gaps in leaves projected crescent sun images onto the ground, demonstrating nature’s pinhole imaging. The understanding of the camera obscura was significantly enhanced by the medieval Arab scholar Ibn al-Haytham. In his Book of Optics, he provided the first accurate experimental analysis of how a small aperture in a dark space can project an external image, correctly noting that the image is inverted and becomes sharper as the aperture decreases. Alhazen also grasped the relationship between the pinhole and the focal point, predicting how a lens could enhance projection. Latin translations of Alhazen’s work in the 13th century impacted scholars such as Roger Bacon and Leonardo da Vinci. By 1502, Leonardo da Vinci had detailed the camera obscura, illustrating how sunlight illuminates a scene that is projected through a small opening into a dark room, appearing upside-down on the opposite wall.
During the Renaissance, the camera obscura evolved from a mere curiosity into a functional tool. Around 1550, methods for incorporating lenses in the aperture were devised to enhance image brightness. In 1558, Neapolitan scholar Giambattista della Porta released Magia Naturalis, which featured a highly popular account of the camera obscura. Della Porta recommended utilising a concave mirror to project images onto paper for drawing. In a subsequent edition, he proposed employing a convex lens for a brighter image. He suggested innovative applications, such as secretly displaying terrifying images to frighten people in the dark, effectively outlining a precursor to the magic lantern prank. Due to Della Porta’s widely circulated writings, the knowledge of the camera obscura spread throughout Europe.
The term camera obscura was first introduced by the German astronomer Johannes Kepler in 1604. Kepler utilised it for practical applications like observing solar phenomena through projection. By the 17th century, portable camera obscuras emerged, available as small tabletop boxes with lenses and mirrors, or as tents and rooms for artists to enter. It gained significant popularity as a drawing tool. Artists could place thin paper on the projection surface to trace the scene's outlines, easily achieving perfect perspective. Some believe that artists, possibly including Vermeer, though this is debated, may have employed camera obscuras to achieve the remarkable realism and precise lighting in their paintings.
In addition to Alhazen, Leonardo, Della Porta, and Kepler, numerous others contributed to the development of the camera obscura. During the 1660s, English scientist Robert Boyle and his assistant Robert Hooke constructed a portable version. Astronomers such as Christoph Scheiner and Galileo employed camera obscuras equipped with telescopes to safely observe the sun in the early 17th century. In the 18th century, Robert Smith and others authored manuals on constructing camera obscura devices. Notably, renowned artists and explorers utilised these devices. For example, Canaletto is believed to have used one for architectural sketches. In the 19th century, John Herschel and Cornelius Varley utilised the camera obscura and variants like the graphic telescope to draw landscapes. A particularly striking account from the late 13th century describes how experimenter Arnaldus de Villa Nova reportedly used a dark room with an aperture to project live street scenes or performances for an audience, captivating them with what must have appeared as magical, live images, effectively using the camera obscura as a form of entertainment.
By the early 19th century, the camera obscura evolved from a mere artist’s tool or scientific device into the direct precursor of the photographic camera. Inventors were keen to find methods for permanently capturing the transient light images produced by the camera obscura. Joseph Nicéphore Niépce achieved this breakthrough in France during the 1820s by coating a pewter plate with light-sensitive bitumen, placing it in a camera obscura, and, after an exceptionally long exposure, managing to fix the view from his window. This heliograph, created in 1826, holds the distinction of being the earliest surviving photograph. Building upon Niépce’s achievements, Louis Daguerre refined the daguerreotype process by 1839, allowing for the creation of highly detailed images on silvered copper plates using a camera obscura. Concurrently, Henry Fox Talbot in England was developing his own paper-based photographic method known as the calotype. Talbot specifically noted the camera obscura’s unmatched beauty of natural images and pondered how to make these images permanent, which inspired his experiments. Thus, the camera obscura literally transformed into the camera, with the inclusion of photographic film or plates. It is noteworthy that the term camera obscura ultimately gave rise to the word camera, as early photographers like Daguerre and Talbot were effectively capturing fleeting light paintings within those dark boxes.
Culturally, the camera obscura transformed our understanding of vision and representation. It served as a model for the human eye. In the 17th century, thinkers likened the eye to a camera obscura, where a lens projects an image onto the retina, influencing theories of perception and philosophy. Artists utilised it to enhance realism. Some art historians speculate that earlier masters may have secretly employed camera obscura-like projections to achieve accurate proportions. The device became a public spectacle, and by the 18th and 19th centuries, tourist camera obscuras were established in parks and scenic locations. A building or tent would function as a giant camera, projecting panoramic outdoor views onto a table in a darkened interior for visitors to enjoy. This represented visual entertainment before photography. One could say it was akin to live-streaming a landscape into a room. The camera obscura also significantly impacted scientific practices, such as safely tracking celestial events through projection and aiding military surveying and mapping with accurate drawings. Ultimately, its greatest legacy lies in teaching us how to capture an image with light, directly leading to the invention of photography. Every modern camera, from film devices to those in your phone, functions on the same core principle as the ancient camera obscura, a controlled entrance of light into a dark chamber to form an image. The primary difference is that we now possess a medium to permanently record that image.
Magic Lantern
The magic lantern is considered the first image projector and a precursor to both slide and movie projectors. Unlike the camera obscura, the magic lantern displays pre-prepared images. A traditional magic lantern features a light source, originally an oil lamp or candle, and later, limelight or an electric bulb, inside a box, with a concave mirror positioned behind it to direct and enhance the light. On the side of the box is a slot for inserting a transparent glass slide that carries the image to be projected. This image can be hand-painted, printed, or a photographic glass plate. At the front of the box is a lens that projects the illuminated image from the slide onto a distant screen or wall. The optical system operates similarly to a camera but in reverse, with light emerging from the lens rather than entering it. A single convex lens produces an inverted image, mirroring the camera obscura, which requires inserting slides upside-down to display the image correctly. When focused properly, the lantern projects a large, bright image onto a wall in a darkened room, marvelling audiences unaccustomed to seeing light-cast images. The technological advancement of the magic lantern combined the principles of lens design for image focus and enlargement with improvements in light sources. Early lanternists relied on candles or oil lamps, which produced dim projections. By the 19th century, brighter alternatives like the Argand oil lamp, limelight, and, ultimately, electric arc lamps became available, enabling shows in larger venues. Some lanterns have two lenses side by side, and a biunial lens that allowed operators to dissolve images smoothly between transitions, a popular trick among showmen in the late 1800s.
The concept of projecting images using light dates back to the Renaissance period. One of the earliest mentions comes from the Italian scholar Giovanni della Fontana around 1420, who created a sketch of a device designed to cast an image of a devil onto a wall to frighten viewers. Fontana’s illustration depicts a basic lantern without a lens, essentially a lamp featuring a small translucent depiction of a demon. This demonstrates the idea of projection, though the image would have appeared blurry without a lens for focusing. This can be seen as an early version of a magic lantern. Moving ahead to the 17th century, the magic lantern that we recognise today began to develop. A prominent figure in this evolution was Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens. By the 1650s, Huygens had constructed a functional lantern. In 1659, he informed his brother about an apparatus capable of projecting a moving figure of death, a skeleton wielding a scythe, a chilling piece he invented. He is frequently acknowledged as the inventor of the magic lantern, possessing one in an operational form by 1659.
In the 1660s, Danish mathematician Thomas Walgenstein discovered the device. Walgenstein travelled throughout Europe to demonstrate and sell lanterns, thereby popularising the term Laterna Magica, Latin for magic lantern. Another notable figure from this era is the German Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher. In 1646, Kircher published The Great Art of Light and Shadow, which detailed a projection device and suggested improvements to earlier designs, such as using a convex lens to sharpen the image. His book featured diagrams of lanterns projecting the images of devils and saints. While he likely did not invent the lantern since his publication came after Huygens’ creation, Kircher’s writings significantly contributed to its dissemination. His was the first published illustration of an authentic magic lantern, which led to him being credited as the inventor for many years. Recent historians agree that Huygens was the primary inventor, Walgenstein the main populariser, and Kircher an influential early documenter.
By the late 17th and early 18th centuries, magic lanterns had become very popular. Travelling entertainers throughout Europe showcased them, captivating audiences with painted slides depicting everything from biblical narratives to playful cartoons. These performances, often referred to as galanty shows or phantasmagoria, could be enjoyed at fairs or within private parlours. In the 18th century, magic lanterns were also employed for educational and scientific purposes. Educators utilised lanterns to project images that illustrated subjects like anatomy and astronomy, serving as an early version of the slideshow. Slides featuring multiple images were capable of simulating movement. For instance, a slide depicting the lunar phases could be rotated in front of the lens. By the end of the 18th century, a particular form of horror theatre known as phantasmagoria gained immense popularity across Europe. A notable showman, Étienne-Gaspard Robertson from Paris, utilised a modified lantern mounted on wheels to project spectral images that appeared to hover and move. He could adjust the lantern's distance from the screen, making images appear larger or smaller, effectively creating the illusion of spirits approaching or receding. Robertson’s phantasmagoria performances in a dimly lit converted crypt, complete with smoke and sound effects, terrified and entranced audiences, earning him fame for raising the dead through the magic lantern. These performances underscore the Magic Lantern's cultural significance, as it facilitated mass visual storytelling and foreshadowed the advent of cinema.
As the 19th century began, magic lanterns became increasingly popular. During the Victorian era, lanterns were widely used for public education and entertainment. Missionaries used them to illustrate moral tales. Lecturers displayed travelogues featuring images of distant places, and families delighted in magic lantern kits for home entertainment. The advent of photography enhanced the magic lantern's significance. Real photographs on glass slides could now be shown. By the 1850s, hand-tinted photographic lantern slides illustrated famous locations, current events, and notable figures to audiences who could only read about them before. Consequently, the lantern with photographic slides emerged as the world’s first slide projector and served as a precursor to documentary films. This technology continued to thrive into the 20th century, with standard 35mm slide projectors of the mid-1900s being direct descendants of the magic lantern. It wasn’t until motion picture and later digital projectors took over that the magic lantern eventually faded from use.
We have already mentioned Huygens, Kircher, Walgenstein, and Robertson as innovators of the magic lantern. Additionally, we can include Paul de Philipsthal, a showman who first introduced phantasmagoria in the 1790s prior to Robertson, and Henry Langdon Childe, who developed the biunial lantern and the technique of dissolving images in London. In scientific advancements, Joseph Plateau and others utilised lanterns for some of the earliest moving images, such as the animated Phénakisticope disks in the 1830s. Lewis Carroll was a passionate amateur lanternist who performed magic lantern shows for children. Also significant are the manufacturers. Companies like Carpenter & Westley in London and the Ernst Plank Company in Germany produced widely used lanterns and exquisite slides during the 19th century, contributing to the standardisation of the equipment.
Often referred to as the forerunner of the motion picture, the magic lantern enlivened static images by displaying them large and vividly for audiences. This introduced a revolutionary method for experiencing visuals outside of pages or canvases. Culturally, it democratised access to visual information and storytelling. People could view projected images of Egypt's pyramids or illustrations of tiny organisms through a lantern show. The term magic aptly reflects its impact. For pre-cinema viewers, the dynamic, shifting, and oversized images were truly remarkable. This innovation gave rise to a new profession: the showman, creating a unique shared experience of watching images projected in a darkened space, an experience that foreshadowed cinema itself. Many pioneering filmmakers drew inspiration from or even practised stage magic and lantern shows before transitioning to film. In essence, the magic lantern served as a crucial medium for projected visual storytelling for centuries, nurturing the aspirations for moving images. It undoubtedly facilitated the acceptance of cinema upon its arrival, as audiences were already accustomed to gathering in dark venues to view flickering images on screens, thanks to the era of the magic lantern.
Camera Lucida
The camera lucida, meaning light chamber in Latin, is an optical drawing tool patented by English scientist William Hyde Wollaston in 1806. Contrary to its name, it differs significantly from the camera obscura, as it does not project images onto a surface. Instead, it enables artists to view a scene along with their drawing surface simultaneously. The artist looks through a specialised prism or mirror arrangement that visually combines the landscape or subject with the drawing paper. This leads to a ghostly image of the subject appearing on the paper, allowing the artist to trace it. Unlike the camera obscura, it can be used in broad daylight and is a portable device, often just a prism attached to an adjustable arm clamped to a sketchbook. Wollaston's original design features a four-sided glass prism. When the artist holds their eye near the prism, one part reflects light from the subject while another lets light from the paper enter the eye. The clever geometry of the prism allows the eye to view two overlapping images. A reflected image of the scene is directed downward, and a direct view of the paper is visible. Wollaston designed the prism to keep the scene’s orientation intact, due to two reflections that cancel out the mirror inversion, an essential advantage over a basic half-mirror. Consequently, the artist sees what resembles a faint hologram of the subject on the drawing surface, which they can trace with a pencil. Since the brightness of the paper can sometimes overpower the faint reflection, artists often opt for grey or tinted paper to balance the light or use a shaded filter over the prism. Mastering the camera lucida requires skill, as one must keep one eye aligned with the prism’s edge while possibly closing the other. However, with practice, it significantly accelerates sketching with accurate perspective and proportions.
Long before Wollaston, scientists were aware that two images could merge. In 1611, astronomer Johannes Kepler presented a comparable concept in his work Dioptrice, outlining the optical principle behind a lightroom device. Despite this, Kepler never constructed it, and his insights faded into obscurity for two centuries. Wollaston later independently conceived the idea and patented it in 1806, bringing the camera lucida to the attention of artists and scientists at the time. Travelling artists and naturalists quickly adopted the device for its practicality. By the 1820s, it was being produced in London and had become a staple in a gentleman’s travel kit. For instance, renowned French neoclassical painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres likely utilised a camera lucida or a similar prism device for some of his stunning portrait drawings in the early 1800s. The camera lucida also played an important role in microscopy. With the advent of more powerful microscopes, scientists began attaching small camera lucida prisms to them, allowing for precise drawings of their microscopic observations. During the 19th century and into the 20th, microscopists commonly employed the camera lucida to create detailed plates of cells and tissues, as taking photographs through a microscope was challenging or unfeasible at that time. Remarkably, even in the 1980s, fields such as neurobiology continued to rely on camera lucida drawings to record microscopic structures.
Besides Wollaston, William Henry Fox Talbot is crucial to the history of the camera lucida. In October 1833, while honeymooning in Italy, Talbot attempted to capture the beauty of Lake Como using a camera lucida. Although he found the device user-friendly, he realised that his drawing skills fell short. The stunning sights viewed through the prism did not translate into graceful pencil strokes once he looked away. He later described the “faithless pencil” as leaving merely a poor imprint on the paper, which left him deeply disappointed. This experience inspired Talbot to dream of a method that would enable natural images to imprint themselves durably without reliance on an artist’s skill. Essentially, he pondered whether the transient images created by optical devices could be preserved chemically. This curiosity motivated him to experiment with light-sensitive paper in 1834, leading to his development of photogenic drawing and the calotype process. He pointedly acknowledged the camera lucida for inspiring his quest to capture the images of nature. Therefore, the camera lucida played an indirect but significant role in the birth of photography.
Another intriguing figure is the artist David Hockney, who in 2001 controversially proposed that many Old Masters may have employed optical aids such as the camera lucida or camera obscura to achieve their realistic effects. Although Hockney’s theory primarily focuses on concave mirrors and camera obscuras in earlier eras, since the camera lucida was not invented until later, he did imply that subsequent artists, like Ingres, utilised a camera lucida. This ignited conversations about the significance of optical tools in art, highlighting that the camera lucida was indeed commonly used by talented artists, rather than just those who could not draw. In reality, many artists chose to keep their use of these devices confidential to preserve an aura of skill. The outcomes are evident. The camera lucida facilitated remarkably accurate drawings with relative ease.
Culturally, the camera lucida represents a meeting point for art, science, and photography. For artists, it served as a valuable instrument, but its use sparked debates. Does tracing an optical image constitute art or just a mechanical reproduction? This contention foreshadows the discussions that photography itself would incite. Some artists criticised tools like the camera lucida and camera obscura as dishonest, while others welcomed them as useful observational aids. To some extent, the camera lucida made draftsmanship more accessible. It enabled amateurs to create decent portraits or landscapes, much like photography would democratise the image-taking process. In scientific terms, it was vital to document the microscopic world and other observations before photography took over that responsibility. From an educational standpoint, using a camera lucida honed individuals' skills in accurate observation. Culturally, its most significant contribution was influencing early photographers, serving as a bridge between drawing and photography. Talbot’s poetic phrase for photography, “the pencil of nature,” could almost refer back to the camera lucida: nature’s image rendered through light. The device itself still finds application in niche areas. For example, some archaeologists and biologists continue to use modern iterations to sketch discoveries, and a recent Kickstarter revival featuring products like the NeoLucida demonstrates ongoing interest. Unlike the camera obscura or magic lantern, the camera lucida did not have widespread public appeal. It was a more personal and contemplative tool. A silent precursor that taught us to convert real-world scenes onto paper using optics. In this way, it foreshadowed a deep-seated wish that photography ultimately satisfied, to capture the visual reality around us effortlessly.
Conclusion
The early techniques: shadowgraphy, camera obscura, magic lantern, and camera lucida, played a vital role in enhancing our understanding of light and imagery. Shadowgraphy revealed the impact of silhouettes and negative images. The camera obscura illustrated how to create images using lenses and apertures. The magic lantern enabled the projection and sharing of images with audiences, while the camera lucida allowed for capturing images with optical accuracy by hand. Collectively, they represent a progression of innovation. These methods sparked creativity and prompted new inquiries: Can the fleeting be made permanent? Can a still image be animated? Photography and cinematography ultimately addressed these questions. However, it was the early techniques and their pioneers who illuminated the path forward, literally harnessing the light from the sun to advance the art and science of image creation.
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Camera Lucida
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Camera Obscura
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Magic Lantern
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