Bienvenidos a la Dark Room

The word camera in Latin means "vaulted room," and is also the origin of our modern word "chamber." On the first day of school in sixth grade, a strange skeleton of a man called Mr. Lang spoke to me and the other children only in Latin. He seemed in his faux-foreign tongue to insist that the classroom was a camera. The camera obscura (literally "dark room") is the ancient ancestor -- in name and in form -- of the modern camera. The old model involved an enclosed box of darkness with a small hole (an aperture) allowing light from outside to cast an upside-down image onto the facing wall of the chamber. Over time, film and digital technologies have allowed us to shrink the chamber and capture the image inside it by absorbing the light with photo-reactive chemicals or light-sensitive cells that save a pixelated map of digital information. (As a side note, the word photo-graph [literally a light-carving] stood the test of time in favor of such other contestants as photogene, heliograph, and sunprint.)

Today an increasing number of people carry some form of camera on their bodies at all times. Regardless of the quality of the camera or the carrier's level of interest in photography, somewhere in the device is a small dark chamber that lets in light only when asked to. And that little room is floating around in our purses and pockets, quickly taken for granted as a necessary part of the all-encompassing pocket knife, the package-deal they currently call a Smart phone. The functional metaphor of the room is able to hide within our devices much like the camera's history hides within its own name.

But in a certain sense we inhabit those dark chambers in spite of their microscopic proportions, and we experience life as if hidden inside the cameras. I am often critical of this behavior. But on second thought, it needn't necessarily be a retreat into isolation: like the mask, the camera is a social tool that can reveal information, in the moment, about the user who seems to hide behind it. And perhaps this is nothing new: the little dark room (and the wall collecting patterns of light from an upside-down image) is included in the packaging of each eye set into the human skull. Some of our ancestors, too, must have suffered at times from living too much "in the head," clinging to memories and obsessing over the process of preserving things. Indeed it is not too difficult to imagine early humans experiencing a fear of death. I discovered the other day that my first and only photography teacher is publishing a book on what he calls the Paleo-camera theory.

He speculates that the camera obscura was discovered by humans of the Paleolithic era, and cites it as the possible origin of representational art. By his account, small openings in the leather walls of early dwellings would have allowed pinpricks of light to penetrate and cast an inverted image on the opposite surface of the tent. (The picture above tells around 1,000 words.)

Now, I'm not here to lecture about the primal origins of photography or insist that all technology originates in the body, but one thing the human eye and early human dwellings have in common is that they are not enclosed with right-angles. A bizarre feature of most of today's cameras and dwelling-rooms is the fierce, almost unanimous persistence of the rectangular frame. I have spent many hours griping about linear thinking, square attitudes, and cubic building-strategies, which can lead to a comically hypocritical tirade against elevators and "concrete ideas" in a few seconds flat. After toppling my own building enough times, my current and more neutral comment is that in any dimension a square is a fine shape indeed -- just not the only shape there is. (In spite of our modern calendars, it's also not a very good shape to describe the movement of time. But happy New Years nonetheless.)

I look
forward
to developing a more open-source camera for myself -- a room that invites others inside. With this strange new post in the underbelly of cyberspace i am expanding the corners of my room and rearranging it daily, trusting that with time it will take the shape of an ancient (or eventual) invitation.

So with that, welcome to my dark room.