MIDNIGHT SUN CAMERA OBSCURA

Dianne Bos // Lea Bucknell // Ernie Kroeger // Donald Lawrence // Kevin Schmidt and Holly Ward // Carsten Wirth // Andrew Wright // Michael Yuhasz

Central Gallery
January 16 to March 19, 2016

Curated by Charo Neville

Camera obscura is Latin for “darkened chamber” or “dark room.” It is a device that admits light through a small opening (often behind a glass lens) into a box or darkened room to project an upside down image of the outside world onto a surface opposite. German Astronomer Johannes Kepler coined the term “camera obscura” in 1604, but experiments with optical devices that eventually led to the creation of light-proof chambers with holes that act as a lens began by astronomers as early as the fourth century BCE. Cameras obscura were used in the Renaissance period to produce images and plans for linear perspective and in the eighteenth century for staging scientific experiments. It was through these observations and discoveries that we learned that the visual imprint of light on the retina is inverted. Theories of optics and the use of the camera obscura have driven philosophical inquiry into the nature of what we see and how we see in the world around us.