Optics Before Photography

05 / HISTORY

A History of the Pinhole Camera

The history of the pinhole camera runs from observing an image projected through a small opening into a dark space, to fixing that image on a light-sensitive material, and on to contemporary practices concerned with light, time and space. It is not the story of one inventor, but of observation, apparatus, recording technologies and artistic expression developing in stages across different places.

1. Around the fourth to third centuries BCE

   The optical passages in the later Mohist writings collected in the Mozi are interpreted as describing light crossing at a small opening and forming an upside-down image of a person. This is not an invention attributable to Mozi himself, but is interpreted as one of the early surviving accounts of pinhole image formation. [1][2]

2. Compiled from the third century BCE to the early seventh century CE

   Book XV of the Greek Problems asks why sunlight passing through quadrilateral openings forms circular images, and why eclipse light passing through a sieve, leaves or interlaced fingers produces crescents on the ground. It is not an authentic work by Aristotle and was compiled over many centuries, so it does not establish his personal observation or invention. [15]

3. Early eleventh century

   Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen), a scholar of the medieval Islamic world, described an image formed through a small opening in a darkened space. Pinhole projection also served to study eclipses and the rectilinear propagation of light. [1][15]

4. Around 1508–1509

   Leonardo da Vinci recorded how an exterior scene passing through a small opening into a darkened room appears reduced on paper, upside down, and with its colours and forms. The observation remained unpublished during his lifetime. [1][3]

5. Observed in 1544 / published in 1545

   Gemma Frisius observed a solar eclipse at Leuven by projecting it into a darkened room, then illustrated the method in a book published the following year. The relationship between aperture, dark interior and projection could now circulate in print. [4]

6. Mid- to late sixteenth century

   Lenses and mirrors were added at the aperture to produce brighter, sharper projections, developing the pinhole dark room into an optical camera obscura. Its uses widened beyond astronomy to surveying, spectacle and other practices. [1][5][17]

7. 1604

   In Ad Vitellionem Paralipomena, Johannes Kepler connected dark-room projection to theories of optics and vision. A Max Planck Institute history locates the term camera obscura—more strictly camera clausa—in this work. It was a milestone in naming and theorising a known principle, not the invention of the apparatus. [16][17]

8. Seventeenth to eighteenth centuries

   The room-sized camera obscura developed into tents, sedan-chair forms, boxes and pocket models. Artists and draughtspeople copied its projections as drawing aids, while it also became an apparatus for entertainment and optical investigation. [1][5][17]

9. Around 1826–1827

   Nicéphore Niépce used a camera obscura and a bitumen-coated metal plate to preserve a projected image. The surviving heliograph cannot be identified as a pinhole photograph, but it marks an important transition from viewing a temporary projection to retaining a photograph. [5][6]

10. 1856

    Scottish scientist David Brewster reported that he and the Reverend Mr Egerton exposed a photograph of a bust for about ten minutes through an aperture smaller than one-hundredth of an inch. He predicted that more sensitive materials could make a lensless camera with only a pinhole a preferred instrument. [7]

11. 1890

    George Davison made An Old Farmstead, later known as The Onion Field, with a pinhole camera, printed it on rough paper and won a medal at the Photographic Society of Great Britain’s annual exhibition. Its soft image became a focus of debate between sharp and pictorial photography. [8]

12. 1968–1984

    In the later twentieth century, pinhole practices again spread as ways of working with light, time and space. Eric Renner began making pinhole work in 1968, connected artists through exhibitions, workshops and publications, and established Pinhole Resource in 1984—one strand in a broader revival across many places. [9]

13. 2001 to the present

    The official Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day site preserves records from 2001. On the last Sunday in April each year, pinhole photographs made around the world continue to be gathered into its online gallery. [13]

14. 2006 to the present

    Since 2006, Meisai Okamoto has used pinhole cameras and camera obscura to make works concerned with light entering darkness, extended exposure, and the relationship between apparatus and space.