This optical box from the Museum of Cinema in Catalonia dates from the late 18th century. (Link to YouTube video).
It had multiple functions: You could use it as a camera obscura for drawing. Besides this, it could be folded up into the shape of a book and easily transported.
Or it could be set up like for viewing theatrical dioramas, kind of an ancestor of Disney's multiplane camera.
3 comments:
Wow! This is very cool. Clement would have a lot of fun with this!
This reminds me of an old ‘Lucy-graph’ I used to have, very similar, but it projected a 3d object in the box up onto a sheet of glass for tracing. If that Lucy (made around 1940’s) was designed as well as this optical box (and could double as a Camera Obscura) I might have kept the old dinosaur around. -RQ
I've seen the folding camera-in-book design before (Joshua Reynolds had one), if not one that doubled as a scenographic viewer, but it's nice to see one being unfolded as we see in the video. It would appear to be an enligenment era "amusement" more than a serous artist's tool. The aperture they show is way too small for practical viewing of a projection and the schematic drawing they show is from the 19th century (French), and shows a meniscus lens (convex on one side, and concave on the other), which was a important nineteenth century improvement that gave better edge to edge focus, a problem that plagued previous camera obscuras.
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