Page 5 - Expanded Photography

Expanded Photography Bob Cotton 5/146
Anon - 18th Century Shadow-graph and Silhouette Portraits.
By fixing a sheet of thin paper to a sheet of glass, the artist could trace the silhouette of the subject cast by the sun. The Wedgwood family often used these elegant silhouettes in their ceramic decora- tion, and were always looking for new ways of transferring images from paper to clay or biscuit- ware, ready for glazing and re-firing.
(left) Table-top camera obscura 1819 (right) William Hyde Wollaston Camera Lucida 1806) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camera_lucida
Here are the two drawing machines that superseded the 18th century Shadowgraph. One, the
Camera Obscura , is the revival of an age-old idea (the pin-hole camera) and is repackaged and productivised in 1819 by Benjamin West as a highly portable drawing aid, to be used in the sa- lon and the withdrawing room (above left). Light rays reflected from a sitter are captured by the lens and projected via a prism onto a shielded frosted-glass screen, so that by laying thin paper on the screen, the image of the sitter can be accurately traced. Larger versions had been built in gardens and parks in the previous century, but here we have a more accessible and even porta-
ble table-top camera obscura. The second (earlier) device (above right) is Wollaston’s Camera Lucida, a clever prismatic drawing aid that enabled