Leaving a mark
February 15th 2010 23:17
:
the dawn of photographic history
What follows is a brief and broad timeline on the development of photography including some points of fact concerning the invention of animation, film and video. My primary intention is to provide no less than five facts about the development of photography and animation.
As an Arts Practitioner, to look at the creative thinking that led the human being first from Cave Paintings to the Camera Obscura and then Beyond is very eye opening.
At this moment in history and human invention it is possible to actively participate in the activity of photography without knowing any of these facts I have found them so inspiring, I hope to present them to hopefully inspire some creative thinking on your part.
As I said; at this moment in history it is possible to actively participate in the activity of photography without using the instruments that early inventors and creative thinkers invented; some of the inventions presented here are nothing more than ideas. Original ideas, and questions that were asked centuries ago.
The answers to these questions, and the human drive to discover the answers to them, have forged a journey to where we find ourselves now. We see the world now with the same desire to interpret it as we always have as a species, but because we are determined to truly develop our basic needs we have invented extraordinarily sophisticated ways to bear witness of what we've seen.
Inventions we use in 2008 such as the computer and computer software in the crafts of photography, animation, film and video making, employ the same discoveries, use the same principals, and build on original ideas that have been on the mind of the human being since prehistoric times. One only has to look at the onion skin function in an animation software program (such as Adobe Flash) to appreciate the associations between the pragmatic human behavior of a prehistoric cave painter and the technologically evolved functions utilized by a digital animator. The cave painter and the digital animator have the same objective, they're just two people who need to tell a story.
So, why start so far back as Cave Paintings?
What I find so compelling is this human determination to create an accurate depiction of an event, and the extraordinary creativity that has ensued in the pursuit of doing so. I'm not alone when I suggest that the drive to create photographs is connected to the compulsive urge human beings have to tell a story. People have always been compelled in some way to say: This is what... who... when... where... how; this is what happened.
Researchers have delved back into the past as far as 30.000 years and found examples of this behavior - to create an image in order to leave an impression, or as they say, leave a mark.
If I pose the question which came first Photography or Animation you may think photographs had to be invented before animation however that is not the case. If we were to answer the question correctly we'd have to say Animation.
In fact you could argue that from the moment a person was able to consciously cast a shadow and make shadow plays with their hands between a surface and a light source Animation was invented; it wasn't terribly sophisticated but it was an optical illusion created with light and human endeavor.
Evidently prehistoric cave dwellers did their best to introduce movement into the marks they left, what we now construe as their works of art.
Early examples of attempts to capture the phenomenon of motion into a still drawing can be found in Paleolithic cave paintings, where animals are depicted with multiple legs in superimposed positions, clearly attempting to convey the perception of motion.
In its account of the History of Animation, Wikipedia
So Animation came first, then drawing, painting, capturing a picture, taking a photograph and all to tell a story because people are story tellers. I think that passion and determination to create an accurate depiction of an event forced humans to invent everything from cave paintings to the most sophisticated cameras pointed towards our infinite universe. I'm quite aware that this is a very sweeping statement but the connection between these old ideas, discoveries and inventions continues to really stand out to me.
Now, if I saw this amazing image of outer space, I'd want to know more about what it was, so in order to quench that thirst for knowledge here is the official description of the image of The Eagle Nebula Explanation: Newborn stars are forming in the Eagle Nebula. This image, taken with the Hubble Space Telescope in 1995, shows evaporating gaseous globules (EGGs) emerging from pillars of molecular hydrogen gas and dust. The giant pillars are light years in length and are so dense that interior gas contracts gravitationally to form stars. At each pillars' end, the intense radiation of bright young stars causes low density material to boil away, leaving stellar nurseries of dense EGGs exposed. The Eagle Nebula, associated with the open star cluster M16, lies about 7000 light years away.
Consider this amazing fact; a Persian scientist born in 965 AD named Abu Ali Al-Hasan Ibn al-Haitham, built a camera which was used to capture pictures in outer space. That camera is known as the Camera Obscura; during the last century scientists discovered that the Camera Obscura could be used to photograph X-ray radiation and gamma rays, which the ordinary lens absorbs.
These images are some of the very first photographs captured a couple of hundred years ago and consider for a moment, these are not exactly the originals.
These are scans of the originals transferred over the internet via electricity, stored on a computer and made available globally; their journey has been a long one and it is amazing to consider how quickly we have gone from figuring out how to capture these images into being able to project them on a screen.
Certainly we have seen multi million dollar industries emerge as a result of these pictures. The Photographic Industry, the Film Industry, the Publishing Industry to name a few of so many.
Back to the development of photography; prehistoric people literally drew on all sorts of things in the same way Graffiti Artists do today, they were very creatively expressive and curiously inventive. Questions and ideas about optics and geometry began emerging as early as 350 BC. The earliest recorded mentions of discovery of the principles behind the Camera Obscura or Pinhole Camera, belong to Mo Tzu (470 BC - 390 BCE), a Chinese philosopher, quite separately, Greek philosopher, scientist, and physician Aristotle (384-322 BCE), makes casual reference to the Camera Obscura as he questions how the sun can make a circular image when it shines through a square hole.
In his treatise on optics Persian Scientist Ibn al-Haitham (965-1039 AD), which was translated into Latin in 1270 as Opticae thesaurus Alhazeni libri vii, al-Haitham published theories on refraction, reflection, binocular vision, focusing with lenses, the rainbow, parabolic and spherical mirrors, spherical aberration, atmospheric refraction, and the apparent increase in size of planetary bodies near the Earth's horizon.
al-Haitham was first to give an accurate account of vision, correctly stating that light comes from the object seen to the eye. Euclid, aka Euclid of Alexandria (325 BC - 265 BC) wrote the earliest surviving work on geometrical optics (called Optics). There were a number of Medieval Latin translations of this work which became of new importance in the fifteenth century for the theory of linear perspective.
As an Arts Practitioner, to look at the creative thinking that led the human being first from Cave Paintings to the Camera Obscura and then Beyond is very eye opening.
At this moment in history and human invention it is possible to actively participate in the activity of photography without knowing any of these facts I have found them so inspiring, I hope to present them to hopefully inspire some creative thinking on your part.
As I said; at this moment in history it is possible to actively participate in the activity of photography without using the instruments that early inventors and creative thinkers invented; some of the inventions presented here are nothing more than ideas. Original ideas, and questions that were asked centuries ago.
The answers to these questions, and the human drive to discover the answers to them, have forged a journey to where we find ourselves now. We see the world now with the same desire to interpret it as we always have as a species, but because we are determined to truly develop our basic needs we have invented extraordinarily sophisticated ways to bear witness of what we've seen.
Inventions we use in 2008 such as the computer and computer software in the crafts of photography, animation, film and video making, employ the same discoveries, use the same principals, and build on original ideas that have been on the mind of the human being since prehistoric times. One only has to look at the onion skin function in an animation software program (such as Adobe Flash) to appreciate the associations between the pragmatic human behavior of a prehistoric cave painter and the technologically evolved functions utilized by a digital animator. The cave painter and the digital animator have the same objective, they're just two people who need to tell a story.
So, why start so far back as Cave Paintings?
What I find so compelling is this human determination to create an accurate depiction of an event, and the extraordinary creativity that has ensued in the pursuit of doing so. I'm not alone when I suggest that the drive to create photographs is connected to the compulsive urge human beings have to tell a story. People have always been compelled in some way to say: This is what... who... when... where... how; this is what happened.
Researchers have delved back into the past as far as 30.000 years and found examples of this behavior - to create an image in order to leave an impression, or as they say, leave a mark.
If I pose the question which came first Photography or Animation you may think photographs had to be invented before animation however that is not the case. If we were to answer the question correctly we'd have to say Animation.
In fact you could argue that from the moment a person was able to consciously cast a shadow and make shadow plays with their hands between a surface and a light source Animation was invented; it wasn't terribly sophisticated but it was an optical illusion created with light and human endeavor.
Evidently prehistoric cave dwellers did their best to introduce movement into the marks they left, what we now construe as their works of art.
Early examples of attempts to capture the phenomenon of motion into a still drawing can be found in Paleolithic cave paintings, where animals are depicted with multiple legs in superimposed positions, clearly attempting to convey the perception of motion.
In its account of the History of Animation, Wikipedia
So Animation came first, then drawing, painting, capturing a picture, taking a photograph and all to tell a story because people are story tellers. I think that passion and determination to create an accurate depiction of an event forced humans to invent everything from cave paintings to the most sophisticated cameras pointed towards our infinite universe. I'm quite aware that this is a very sweeping statement but the connection between these old ideas, discoveries and inventions continues to really stand out to me.
The Eagle Nebula Credit: J. Hester, P. Scowen (ASU), HST, NASA
Now, if I saw this amazing image of outer space, I'd want to know more about what it was, so in order to quench that thirst for knowledge here is the official description of the image of The Eagle Nebula Explanation: Newborn stars are forming in the Eagle Nebula. This image, taken with the Hubble Space Telescope in 1995, shows evaporating gaseous globules (EGGs) emerging from pillars of molecular hydrogen gas and dust. The giant pillars are light years in length and are so dense that interior gas contracts gravitationally to form stars. At each pillars' end, the intense radiation of bright young stars causes low density material to boil away, leaving stellar nurseries of dense EGGs exposed. The Eagle Nebula, associated with the open star cluster M16, lies about 7000 light years away.
Consider this amazing fact; a Persian scientist born in 965 AD named Abu Ali Al-Hasan Ibn al-Haitham, built a camera which was used to capture pictures in outer space. That camera is known as the Camera Obscura; during the last century scientists discovered that the Camera Obscura could be used to photograph X-ray radiation and gamma rays, which the ordinary lens absorbs.
These images are some of the very first photographs captured a couple of hundred years ago and consider for a moment, these are not exactly the originals.
These are scans of the originals transferred over the internet via electricity, stored on a computer and made available globally; their journey has been a long one and it is amazing to consider how quickly we have gone from figuring out how to capture these images into being able to project them on a screen.
Certainly we have seen multi million dollar industries emerge as a result of these pictures. The Photographic Industry, the Film Industry, the Publishing Industry to name a few of so many.
Back to the development of photography; prehistoric people literally drew on all sorts of things in the same way Graffiti Artists do today, they were very creatively expressive and curiously inventive. Questions and ideas about optics and geometry began emerging as early as 350 BC. The earliest recorded mentions of discovery of the principles behind the Camera Obscura or Pinhole Camera, belong to Mo Tzu (470 BC - 390 BCE), a Chinese philosopher, quite separately, Greek philosopher, scientist, and physician Aristotle (384-322 BCE), makes casual reference to the Camera Obscura as he questions how the sun can make a circular image when it shines through a square hole.
Reflective symmetry has been observed since ancient times. Legend claims that early Egyptians would place two or three slabs of highly polished limestone together at different angles and watch with fascination as mandalas were formed by human dancers. It was not until centuries later, however, that this optical phenomenon was encased in one small tube and given a name.
Kaleidoscopes - Wonders of Wonder by Cozy Baker
brewstersociety.com
Kaleidoscopes - Wonders of Wonder by Cozy Baker
brewstersociety.com
In his treatise on optics Persian Scientist Ibn al-Haitham (965-1039 AD), which was translated into Latin in 1270 as Opticae thesaurus Alhazeni libri vii, al-Haitham published theories on refraction, reflection, binocular vision, focusing with lenses, the rainbow, parabolic and spherical mirrors, spherical aberration, atmospheric refraction, and the apparent increase in size of planetary bodies near the Earth's horizon.
al-Haitham was first to give an accurate account of vision, correctly stating that light comes from the object seen to the eye. Euclid, aka Euclid of Alexandria (325 BC - 265 BC) wrote the earliest surviving work on geometrical optics (called Optics). There were a number of Medieval Latin translations of this work which became of new importance in the fifteenth century for the theory of linear perspective.
The first Camera Obscura was built by Abu Ali Al-Hasan Ibn al-Haitham, who gave the first correct explanation of vision, showing that light is reflected from an object into the eye. He studied the complete science of vision, called perspectiva in medieval times, and although he did not apply his ideas to painting, the Renaissance artists later made important use of Al-Haytham's optics.
Mathematics and art - perspective
J J O'Connor and E F Robertson
Mathematics and art - perspective
J J O'Connor and E F Robertson
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David Jobling
