Camera Obscura Quotes:

Maybe the only thing each of us can see is our own shadow. Carl Jung called this his shadow work. He said we never see others. Instead we see only aspects of ourselves that fall over them. Shadows. Projections. Our associations. The same way old painters would sit in a tiny dark room and trace the image of what stood outside a tiny window, in the bright sunlight. The camera obscura. Not the exact image, but everything reversed or upside down.

- Chuck Palahniuk

topic: Fall, Dark, Shadow, Jung, Camera Obscura

Memory works like the collection glass in the Camera obscura: it gathers everything together and therewith produces a far more beautiful picture than was present originally.

- Arthur Schopenhauer

source: "Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life". Book by Arthur Schopenhauer, 1851.

topic: Beautiful, Memories, Glasses, Camera Obscura, Beautiful Picture

I'd like my coffin to be a camera obscura so I can see what's going on outside.

- Bill Jay

topic: Photography, Cameras, Coffins, Camera Obscura

If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from the physical life-process.

- Friedrich Engels

source: Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels (1970). “The German Ideology”, p.47, INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHERS CO

topic: Men, Historical, Cameras, Camera Obscura, Inversions

During photography's first decades, exposure times were quite long... So, similar to the drawings produced with the help of a camera obscura, which depicted reality as static and immobile, early photographs represented the world as stable, eternal, unshakable.

- Lev Manovich

source: Lev Manovich (2001). “The Language of New Media”, p.168, MIT Press

topic: Photography, Reality, Drawing, Camera Obscura

Rape is a crime against sleep and memory; it's afterimage imprints itself like an irreversible negative from the camera obscura of dreams.

- Pat Conroy

topic: Dream, Memories, Sleep, Camera Obscura

Creation rather than painting, or if painting, yet such, and with such co-presence of the whole picture flash'd at once upon the eye, as the sun paints in a camera obscura. (Describing his poetic ideal, 1817)

- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

topic: Eye, Sun, Cameras, Camera Obscura, Whole Picture

Considering that knowledge of the chemical as well as the optical principles of photography was fairly widespread following Schulze's experiment (in 1725)... the circumstance that photography was not invented earlier remains the greatest mystery in its history... It had apparently never occurred to any of the multitude of artists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who were in the habit of using the camera obscura to try to fix its image permanently.

- Helmut Gernsheim

topic: Photography, Artist, Trying, Camera Obscura