“Photography is just one viewpoint, really, and there is never just one viewpoint—there are always thousands of viewpoints. Photographs are not real or that good. To think the highest we will get with reality is photography is naive.”
- David Hockney
The camera obscura, the phenomenon of an inverted image being projected through a small hole in a dark enclosure, has been theorized to be known since 500 BCE. Da Vinci wrote the oldest clear description of the device in 1502 and evidence of its secret use in art since the Renaissance is clear to see.
In Western art, painters were the human cameras of their time. They created hyper realistic portraits and full scale mythical and historical narratives, expertly arranging numerous projections into grand tableaux of multi-figured scenes in precise perspectives. The chiaroscuro compositions with photographic precision of people, costumes and artifacts overwhelmed the visual senses. The status of painters grew from guild-tradespeople to lofty positions as court painters for nobility.
That was until the invention of a chemically fixed image using a camera obscura beginning in 1826. Painters countered with impressionism and expressionism, cubism, and so on, freed from the constraints of hyper-realism, but the photograph, and later the moving picture captured the human experience and told our collective history. Artists in turn embraced the camera and moving picture into individualistic pursuits.
The fact that a photograph represented reality was largely unquestioned, although an image could be potentially staged and manipulated in the darkroom. The selective publication and censorship of images became a way of controlling a political narrative.
