Tracings { 15 images } Created 25 Jun 2013
Tracings
The series Tracings is about experimentation with a camera, lens and film. Each image was created with color slide film photographed from a moving car. These images are about the play of light, about how color and light move out of the night, but mostly about using the camera as a writing instrument, playing with the light writing.
Leonardo da Vinci wrote, about 1500:
“When the images of objects are illuminated penetrate through a small hole into a very dark room, these images are received in the inside of the room on a white paper, situated some distance from the opening. You will see on the paper all these objects in their proper from and colour. They will be reduced in size, they will present themselves in a reversed position, owning to the intersection of the rays.”
One of the first published accounts of the camera obscura adapted for pictorial use appeared in 1558 in Magia Naturalis Libri III by Giovanni Battista Della Porta: “It is necessary to closely shut the windows and door [of the room]…lest even a light daylight should cause the demonstration to fail. The light should be admitted only through a single conical hole bored through the wall, the base of the cone being turned to the sun and the pointed end turned toward the interior. The wall opposite should be kept white or covered with a sheet of paper. One will then perceive everything that is lighted by the sun, and the people passing in the street will have their feet in the air and what is on the right will be on the left side…The images will be much larger as the paper will be farther away from the opening; but the nearer the paper is placed, the smaller they will become…anyone ignorant of the art of painting [can use the camera] to draw with a pencil or pen the image of any subject whatever.”
A camera is first of all a light-tight box, no matter the recording medium, a chamber with a recording media on one side of the chamber and an opening to project light onto the recording media, generating an image. A lens, to focus the light, and a viewfinder to aim the camera are incorporated in some form into this basic camera design. At its core, every camera is this simple; the differences which can be bewildering and wildly inventive are in how well and how easily they perform the optical principles at which Aristotle and Ibn al-Haytham first marveled.
The series Tracings marvels at interplay of light, motion and time within the light-tight chamber of the camera.
Leonardo da Vinci, quoted in John Szarkowski, Photography Until Now, p. 12
Giovanni Battista Della Porta, Magia Naturalis Libri III, as quoted in Joel Synder, The Art of Fixing a Shadow, p. 6
David Arnold
The series Tracings is about experimentation with a camera, lens and film. Each image was created with color slide film photographed from a moving car. These images are about the play of light, about how color and light move out of the night, but mostly about using the camera as a writing instrument, playing with the light writing.
Leonardo da Vinci wrote, about 1500:
“When the images of objects are illuminated penetrate through a small hole into a very dark room, these images are received in the inside of the room on a white paper, situated some distance from the opening. You will see on the paper all these objects in their proper from and colour. They will be reduced in size, they will present themselves in a reversed position, owning to the intersection of the rays.”
One of the first published accounts of the camera obscura adapted for pictorial use appeared in 1558 in Magia Naturalis Libri III by Giovanni Battista Della Porta: “It is necessary to closely shut the windows and door [of the room]…lest even a light daylight should cause the demonstration to fail. The light should be admitted only through a single conical hole bored through the wall, the base of the cone being turned to the sun and the pointed end turned toward the interior. The wall opposite should be kept white or covered with a sheet of paper. One will then perceive everything that is lighted by the sun, and the people passing in the street will have their feet in the air and what is on the right will be on the left side…The images will be much larger as the paper will be farther away from the opening; but the nearer the paper is placed, the smaller they will become…anyone ignorant of the art of painting [can use the camera] to draw with a pencil or pen the image of any subject whatever.”
A camera is first of all a light-tight box, no matter the recording medium, a chamber with a recording media on one side of the chamber and an opening to project light onto the recording media, generating an image. A lens, to focus the light, and a viewfinder to aim the camera are incorporated in some form into this basic camera design. At its core, every camera is this simple; the differences which can be bewildering and wildly inventive are in how well and how easily they perform the optical principles at which Aristotle and Ibn al-Haytham first marveled.
The series Tracings marvels at interplay of light, motion and time within the light-tight chamber of the camera.
Leonardo da Vinci, quoted in John Szarkowski, Photography Until Now, p. 12
Giovanni Battista Della Porta, Magia Naturalis Libri III, as quoted in Joel Synder, The Art of Fixing a Shadow, p. 6
David Arnold
