UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Since ancient times, the camera obscura was used to safely observe solar eclipses without risk of damaging the eyes by looking directly into the sun. In “My Dark Room: Spaces of the Inner Self in Eighteenth-Century England,” Julie Park, Paterno Family Librarian for Literature, Penn State University Libraries, and professor of English at Penn State, explains that it also is a pivotal paradigm for the experience of introspection in daily life.
“Though the camera obscura has been around since ancient times, cultural fascination with the medium rose unmistakably during the 18th century,” Park said. “The camera obscura is a space that functions as a device for allowing light to bring in projected images of the outside world. These images travel through the light ray and materialize as projections on a flat surface, like a wall, which serves as a screen.”
Published by the University of Chicago Press in August 2023, “My Dark Room” illuminates the spatial and physical dimensions of inner life in the 18th century by drawing attention to the interactions between spaces and psyches in private environments. In so doing, it sheds new light on interiority in literature and visual and material culture.
“Our emotional and mental worlds are inseparable from the spaces and environments we live and organize our lives in,” said Park. “The book will appeal to those who are curious about how people in an earlier time period intentionally created living spaces where they could cultivate the world of their imagination.”
Park develops the concept of spatial formalism as a framework for understanding how the experience and design of the camera obscura were incorporated into everyday life spaces in the 18th century.
“Spatial formalism is a critical method that looks at the physical environments of everyday life as vital media for interiority, the inner realm of our thoughts and feelings,” she said. “What's innovative about this is that interiority is traditionally looked upon as abstract and immaterial. The 18th century was an age when material designs, constructs and media for cultivating inner life proliferated in domestic architecture and landscape, dress, letter writing culture, and imaginative writing. All these elements were created specifically to give rise to inner life and its experience.”
Throughout the 18th century, Park said, the camera obscura had a role in many areas of life pertaining to experiences of pleasure and curiosity that hinged on seeing the everyday world from within enclosures. It became both a material and conceptual paradigm for designing and dwelling in spaces of imaginative experience.
“On a basic level, the camera obscura influenced the way people viewed the world and saw their relationships to what they saw as objects of perception, as well as projection,” she said. “The 18th-century spaces I explore in my book, from writing closets and grottos to fake ruins in landscape gardens, country houses, and women’s detachable pockets, either emulate or draw on these principles of the camera obscura.
“The portable version is commonly looked upon as a precursor to the photographic camera and works similarly to the projector of a movie house, but the light source comes from the light outside rather than from within the projector itself,” said Park. “And the moving images are of real life taking place at that moment, not a performance created by a screenwriter and producer captured on film.
“We saw them being used in the Great American Eclipse of 2017, and no doubt they'll be used again for the eclipse of April 8, 2024,” she said. A number of videos are available online that show how you can make them at home with everyday materials.
Peter de Bolla at the University of Cambridge referred to “the dazzling sequence of chapters” in “My Dark Room” as capturing “the excitements and tensions that emerged as imaginative private worlds were projected on real geographies and spaces.” Jayne Lewis at the University of California, Irvine, said, “‘My Dark Room’ opens interiors we once assumed were shut, unsettling familiar narratives about the post-Enlightenment mind. This lucidly dreamed study is a feat of the critical imagination to be experienced as well as read. It will be admired and referenced for years to come.”
“It's innovative to have conceived of literary history in such an intermedial fashion within embodied experiences of material and imaginal spaces via spatial formalism,” Park said. “The historical influence of the camera obscura has relevance to our culture today in our own reliance on technological media for shaping and communicating our inner lives.”