Page 8 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

Expanded Media - and the MediaPlex 8/206 (previous page) 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 decoration, 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Here are the two drawing machines that superseded the 18th century Shadowgraph.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 salon and the withdrawing room (above left). Light rays (sunlight of course) 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 portable table-top camera obscura. The second (earlier) device (above right) is Wollaston’s Camera Lucida, a clever prismatic drawing aid that enabled the artist to see a virtual image of the sitter or the scene through one eye, while drawing normally, using the lucida image as a guide - a bit like the modern augmented reality technology, which superimposes a virtual (usually computer-generated) image over our normal sight, by means of a monocular screen like Google Glasses. The artist David Hockney has made an in-depth study of how artists from the Renaissance onwards may have used convex mirrors and other optical devices - including the 19th century camera lucida - to aid their drawing. He cites Van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Wedding in this thesis, and pays especial attention to Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres and his likely use of the camera lucida in his later portrait drawings. See David Hockney: Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the lost
techniques of the Old Masters (2001). https://www.theguardian.com/education/2001/oct/20/highereducation.news