Fotoreproductie van een prent, voorstellende een draagbare camera obscura before 1905

This is an anonymous reproduction of a print showing a portable camera obscura, and you can see it rendered in ink, on the pages of a book. The camera obscura has always fascinated me. I love to imagine what it might have been like to first encounter such a device. It’s a box, yet a portal. A mechanical contraption which could ‘capture’ images of the world in a way that had never been seen before. It must have felt like magic! Looking at this print, I can see a very early form of image-making, an ancestor to photography and film. It makes me think about the relationship between art and technology. Are these always separate fields? Or are they deeply intertwined? Art has often appropriated from science. The history of painting is full of artists looking at how to create illusions of depth, perspective, and light. Here, science is in pursuit of similar aims—to translate a three-dimensional world onto a two-dimensional surface.