Camera Lucida

Illustration of use of camera lucida (from Wikipedia)

One of my favorite books is Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida (1980). The title comes from a nineteenth-century instrument called the camera lucida. Barthes doesn’t provide much information on it, other than to say parenthetically, “Such was the name of that apparatus, anterior to Photography, which permitted drawing an object through a prism, one eye on the model, the other on the paper.”

 

Gaby Wood, in her recent “Diary” (London Review of Books, June 18, 2020), describes using a camera lucida to etch an image of an albatross skeleton. At first, she struggles:

 

The first time I tried to use mine, dejection was swift. The 19th-century instructions weren’t much help in angling the prism. The image was disconcertingly doubled – more like a migraine than a magic trick. Even when you could focus, you couldn’t see your drawing hand, or you could one minute and not the next. If you blinked it was a disaster. I found the whole enterprise confusing and over-complicated. No wonder it never caught on, I thought.

 

But she persists and eventually achieves a result she finds “liberating.” She says,

 

By the time I used the camera lucida in the museum, I’d spent several months grappling with the strange proposition offered by its prism. I’d read that the image was sharper if you held it over a dark drawing surface, but that didn’t make any sense to me until the smoked metal etching plate was beneath my hand. Suddenly the albatross skeleton appeared on it: bright, spectral. The process was different from the way I’d imagined it. There was a drag, almost a dance, under the needle – a tiny jump of resistance in the copper. Without seeing what you were doing, you could feel it more keenly. It wasn’t like ice-skating at all.

 

That “There was a drag, almost a dance, under the needle – a tiny jump of resistance in the copper” is delightful. The whole piece is delightful. I enjoyed it immensely.