Camera Obscura Quotes

• Carl Jung called this his shadow work. He said we never see others. Instead we see only aspects of ourselves that fall over them. Shadows. Projections. Our associations.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Fall, Shadow Work, Association

  Chuck Palahniuk (2003). “Diary: A Novel”, Doubleday Books

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• Memory works like the collection glass in the Camera obscura: it gathers everything together and therewith produces a far more beautiful picture than was present originally.

  Arthur Schopenhauer

  Beautiful, Memories, Glasses

  "Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life". Book by Arthur Schopenhauer, 1851.

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• I'd like my coffin to be a camera obscura so I can see what's going on outside.

  Bill Jay

  Photography, Cameras, Coffins

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• If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from the physical life-process.

  Friedrich Engels

  Men, Historical, Cameras

  Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels (1970). “The German Ideology”, p.47, INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHERS CO

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• Maybe the only thing each of us can see is our own shadow. Carl Jung called this his shadow work. He said we never see others. Instead we see only aspects of ourselves that fall over them. Shadows. Projections. Our associations. The same way old painters would sit in a tiny dark room and trace the image of what stood outside a tiny window, in the bright sunlight. The camera obscura. Not the exact image, but everything reversed or upside down.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Fall, Dark, Shadow Work

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• During photography's first decades, exposure times were quite long... So, similar to the drawings produced with the help of a camera obscura, which depicted reality as static and immobile, early photographs represented the world as stable, eternal, unshakable.

  Lev Manovich

  Photography, Reality, Drawing

  Lev Manovich (2001). “The Language of New Media”, p.168, MIT Press

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• Rape is a crime against sleep and memory; it's afterimage imprints itself like an irreversible negative from the camera obscura of dreams.

  Pat Conroy

  Dream, Memories, Sleep

  Pat Conroy (2010). “The Prince of Tides: A Novel”, p.344, Open Road Media

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• Creation rather than painting, or if painting, yet such, and with such co-presence of the whole picture flash'd at once upon the eye, as the sun paints in a camera obscura. (Describing his poetic ideal, 1817)

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Eye, Sun, Cameras

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• Considering that knowledge of the chemical as well as the optical principles of photography was fairly widespread following Schulze's experiment (in 1725)... the circumstance that photography was not invented earlier remains the greatest mystery in its history... It had apparently never occurred to any of the multitude of artists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who were in the habit of using the camera obscura to try to fix its image permanently.

  Helmut Gernsheim

  Photography, Artist, Trying

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