Camera Obscura - Unthinking The Sun
- Joe Timothy Coleman
- Mar 29
- 5 min read
Without looking
On August 11, 1999, the sun almost disappeared. I witnessed a (faint!) partial solar eclipse through the projection made by a homemade, shoebox camera obscura (see below). Wide news coverage of the astronomical phenomenon extolled the dangers of looking directly at the sun. Whether it was this, or the cosmic alignment which grabbed my attention, there was something arresting about the event, even as a child. Further South in Cornwall, the sun vanished entirely, confusing birds and throwing Cornwall into an unseasonably cold darkness for several minutes. It marks the beginning of a long-term fascination with the mediated nature of vision - not that I knew it at the time of course...
That experience - seeing by not looking directly - stayed with me. Years later, during my photography degree, I began working with the camera obscura in my own artistic practice. I was engaging with much the same question: What does it mean to see something indirectly? How does technology, whether antiquated, analogue or digital, shape what we live?
What is a Camera Obscura?
A camera obscura is one of the earliest optical devices, used for centuries before the invention of photography. It works on a simple principle: light passing through a small hole into a darkened space creates an inverted image of the outside world. Renaissance artists used it to aid with drawing perspective and material, while philosophers from Mozi to Aristotle pondered its implications for human perception.
The camera obscura was the precursor to the camera. The invention of a light-sensitive material to place inside and “capture” what the camera obscure had previously only framed imbued photography with a mechanical truth. It should be noted that the combination of this scientific breakthrough and its relationship with truth are no coincidence – it extended key themes of the period: Technological Obsession, Scientific Classification, Philosophical Materialism & Humanism. God’s dead, photograph instead.
Camera Obscura artworks
In 2009, I worked with the camera obscura as part of a project exploring interiority and exteriority - how images exist both inside and outside the body, the mind, and the physical world. By turning my student bedroom into an oversized pinhole camera, I wanted to highlight the tension between what is seen and what is hidden, what is projected and what is real. The long exposures solidified the inverted projection (over half an hour) but distorted my real form, despite my attempts to be still.
At the time, social media was relatively new, the iPhone in its early form and this formative time in my life was punctuated by the effects of both: connectivity and performativity. As such, this tech-mediated, personal/private dichotomy centred around the image. The room became a stage upon which to perform these considerations, in which I became an actor/metaphor for these themes and conversations. In the below image, I pointed a Sony Handycam at myself. 15 years later, in a Post Pandemic world of Zoom meetings, live-streamed atrocity and bedroom-millionaire content-creators, the image resounds.
In the same year, Hito Steyerl, wrote In Defence of the Poor Image. The Poor Image is a degraded, low-resolution file that loses clarity as it circulates, yet gains political and cultural weight. Her argument reflected the explosion of online image-sharing, the compression of visual culture into social media, and the way digital images could be weaponized, repurposed, and stripped of context.
Since then, we’ve moved into a further explosive era, where all the arguments above have folded in on themselves into an algorithmic vision. Machinic eyesight, AI-generated imagery, perpetual content. Joanna Zylinska’s Nonhuman Photography considers the image without a human author or a human audience. What role would I play now in my Camera Obscura portraits? Maybe Absence.
The camera obscura reminds us that images have always been constructed, reframed, and transformed. A photograph, whether projected through a pinhole or rendered by an algorithm, is never just a passive window to the world - it is an event of seeing, shaped by its conditions of creation.
The Image as an Eclipse
The 1999 eclipse lasted only minutes, but its impression lasted much longer. Seeing it through a camera obscura reflects questions of mediation through technology in vision. Just as an eclipse changes our perception of daylight, so too do cameras, screens, and the digital tools shape what we believe to be real.
Today, I viewed a partial eclipse - 25 years after that first one. This time, I viewed it through my smartphone, the lens flare producing a perfect impression of the crescent shape. Though the shoebox has been replaced by a mass-produced object of digital connectivity, the fundamental process remains the same: our vision is still mediated by the objects we employ
Of course, the Camera (and its predecessors) revolve around the Humans which harness them. As I work at the edge of these thoughts, it seems increasingly that there are fewer humans inside the camera obscura, and that maybe we are defined now by our absence from its Enlightening Darkness. What next for a less-human/human-less vision?
Less-Human/Human-Less Vision
This mediated vision is no longer just a question of seeing differently, but of who, or what, is doing the seeing. My recent work, To Perceive a City, takes this further, exploring a vision that moves beyond human perception. The project references The Dérive, an urban wandering practice championed by the Situationists, which is inherently anthropocentric; rooted in human movement, experience, and subjectivity. In contrast, To Perceive a City imagines a nonhuman vision—a way of seeing the city not through the lens of individual experience, but through the gaze of machines, algorithms, and automated systems.
To develop this work, I employed a multi-layered process, taking a Derive across a city I know well, photographing automatically to create a dataset for AI to retranslate. The project reconstructs the city as a fragmented, nonhuman perspective - one that is shaped not by human agency, but by the technologies that increasingly govern urban space. This approach challenges the traditional role of the photographer as an observer and instead situates vision as a complex interaction between human and machine perception.
Conclusion
Diagrams of the Camera Obscura place a human in a box (or holding one), navigating physics, corralling light. The human in the diagram is always separate to the associated objects, subjects, apparatus and physical forces. This fostered a role of separation from the world, knowledge and dominion over a separate, subordinate Nature.
Interestingly, in the age of Nonhuman Photography, the Human is now not only separated from the world but separated from the imagery of (and not of) the world. Complex AI systems have eschewed the need for Human creation or verification.
This comes with it a persuasive, dystopian narrative: a Hollywood nightmare where Humans are sidelined by their own technology. However, it is worth considering that the sun which our cameras rely on burned bright for millennia before our arrival and will continue to do so long after. In doing so, maybe there is the opportunity to reconsider the individuality of the camera; a reimagining of the role of vision beyond ownership or authorship.
While there isn’t the scope to fully explore this here: the high cost and specialisation of these systems threatens to restrict this philosophical space. The intersection of technology, economics, and geopolitics is playing a greater role in shaping the landscape of vision and image-making.
Nonetheless, to move beyond the subjectivities of the camera is not necessarily to relinquish vision, but to expand upon it - to recognise that seeing is not solely an act of human will, but a force that continues, whether we are there to witness it or not.