Animated light painting: The public cabinets of camera obscura in St. Petersburg in the first years after the invention of photography

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of the public cabinets of camera obscura, which operated in St. Petersburg in the frst half of the 19th century. Mentions of such cabinets in the press allow us to conclude that they existed in Russia at least since the beginning of the 1820s, but gained in popularity only two decades later. Given this, it is logical to assume that the interest of the capital's public in camera obscura may have been connected to the recent news about the discovery of so-called light painting. The author tries to prove that the connection between the invention of photography and “dark rooms” in minds of contemporaries was inseparable, since photographic images at that time were often described as camera obscura projections fxed on a plane. Using materials from St. Petersburg newspapers of the late 1830s – 1840s, the author demonstrates that descriptions of the optical demonstrations with camera obscura arranged at that time were based on the same topoi as explanations of the principle of photography. The connection between the recent invention of photography and the increased popularity of camera obscura cabinets is also confrmed by the fact that in the mid-1840s the fashion for them passed as quickly as it developed several years earlier. Evidently, never in earlier or in later times were such demonstrations more interesting to the audience than immediately following the invention of photography.