camera ob·scu·ra

(əb-skyo͝or′ə)

A darkened chamber in which the real image of an object is received through a small opening or lens and focused in natural color onto a facing surface rather than recorded on a film or plate.

[New Latin camera obscūra : Latin camera, chamber; see chamber + Latin obscūra, feminine of obscūrus, dark; see obscure.]

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

camera obscura

(ɒbˈskjʊərə)

(Art Terms) a darkened chamber or small building in which images of outside objects are projected onto a flat surface by a convex lens in an aperture. Sometimes shortened to: camera

[New Latin: dark chamber]

Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged, 12th Edition 2014 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2014

cam′era ob•scu′ra

(ɒbˈskyʊər ə)
n., pl. camera ob•scu•ras.

a darkened boxlike device in which images of external objects, received through an aperture, as with a convex lens, are exhibited in their natural colors on a surface.

[1660–70; < New Latin: dark chamber]

ThesaurusAntonymsRelated WordsSynonymsLegend:

Noun

camera obscura - a darkened enclosure in which images of outside objects are projected through a small aperture or lens onto a facing surface

chamber - a natural or artificial enclosed space

Mentioned in

References in classic literature

His mind seemed to turn, on the instant, into a vast camera obscura, and he saw arrayed around his consciousness endless pictures from his life, of stoke-holes and forecastles, camps and beaches, jails and boozing-kens, fever-hospitals and slum streets, wherein the thread of association was the fashion in which he had been addressed in those various situations.

View in context

* Canaletto was so good at perspective drawing that some people believed that he copied what he could see in an instrument called a "camera obscura." A camera obscura is like a simple camera with a mirror in it but no film (photographic film had not yet been invented).

Classroom use of the art print

Photographer Abelardo Morell's just-released book, "Camera Obscura" (Bullfinch Press, September 2004), celebrates a phenomenon known since ancient times.

Trailblazing photography explores alternatives: some of today's most creative fine art photographers are turning to alternative processes and techniques

Concerning the question of optical aids, there is a possible answer well short of the use of lenses, mirrors, or a pinhole camera obscura. A simple grid of strings and a fixed eye point will allow the artist to create a correct perspective with the use of a corresponding grid on paper.

For art's sake. (Letters)

Other instances of western imports that may have altered Japanese perceptions include the optique, a kind of camera obscura, whose effects can be traced in certain prints and in books on geography and natural history.

Europe through the Prism of Japan: Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries.

Aristotle (384-322 BC) understood the optical principle of the camera obscura. He viewed the crescent shape of a partially eclipsed sun projected on the ground through the holes in a sieve, and the gaps between leaves of a plane tree.

Camera obscura

There has long been speculation that Vermeer made use of a camera obscura, an enclosed device that allowed a detailed image of the world to be projected through a lens onto an inner wall.

Traces of genius: is art sullied by technology?

Using small mirrors or lenses, Hockney shows how artists created early versions of the camera obscura. He pegs the advent of mirror-assisted painting to the 1420s, not long after Filippo Brunelleschi had used a camera obscura to capture the doors of Florence's Baptistry and essentially invented vanishing-point perspective.

David Hockney: Secret Knowledge. (Film Reviews)

His most recent books are Popiol i miod (Ashes and honey, 1996) and Camera obscura (1998).

POLISH POEM

The film's overall structure, in which the second half to a large extent mirrors, repeats and alters the first, is somewhat arbitrarily linked to the workings of the camera obscura, for no better reason, apparently, than to conform to the current vogue for 'apparatus theory' in the study of early cinema.

Les Enfants du Paradis

Her own acquaintance with optical devices seems questionable when she identifies Holman Hunt's attempt to paint the night scene of "Light of the World" while having "good daylight" to paint by as a kind of camera obscura. Technically, a strong light exterior to the darkened camera obscura produces an upside-down image on a surface or screen within the box or room on the dark side of the peephole.

Linda Dowling, The Vulgarization of Art: The Victorians and Aesthetic Democracy