One of the great delights of the camera obscura, which means “dark chamber” in Latin, is its physical simplicity relative to the complexity of the image it renders. Taken to the extreme, a properly punctured shoebox might hold the clear but inverted image of the Taj Mahal. How is that physically possible, and how might this mechanism of illusion be useful to a writer of literature?
To begin with, the magic of our obscure and shadowy chamber derives from light’s habit of traveling in straight lines, obedient to its rule of “rectilinear propagation.” The pinhole in the chamber allows for only certain of those lines to come through: Light bounced off the base of our Taj Mahal is projected to the chamber’s top, and light from the Taj Mahal’s top beams toward the bottom, thus creating the camera obscura’s trademark distortion—inversion. There are other distortions, too, of course: If the aperture is too large, the image can become oversize and hazy; if the aperture is too narrow, the image, while acute, may appear dim.
In terms of writing, the physics of the camera obscura may pose an apt analogue. Only certain lines come through. Isn’t the same true when we’re drafting? How many revisions has your mind already run through before that first line, often to be revised yet again, hits the page? And when we sit down to write, whether lines of dialogue or verse or both, how often do we find our aperture needs adjustment—that what we’re crafting is big and visionary but maybe not quite clear? Or that it is clear, but somehow the scope is too small, not ambitious enough? So we set to fiddling with our perceptual settings, trying to bring into focus a new and challenging possibility.
It seems to me an essential tension between accuracy and distortion defines the scenes a camera obscura produces, and this is arguably what makes its function exciting to us—not that it merely reproduces visual reality but that it alters it in some way. The same might be true for what we write. Consider the works of literature that move you most. What is their relationship to so-called objective reality? How do they alter your perception of what surrounds you when, lifting your attention from the page, the world comes rushing back to your senses? And does some form of distortion—an unreliable narrator, say, or the presence of absence in a sonnet of only thirteen lines—serve to animate the text?
A work of literature that never fails to move yours truly is Dante’s Divine Comedy. One of the many exceptional things about this long and dizzyingly intricate masterpiece is that, despite placing us into a fantastical world that traverses death and doubt and myth and even the Ptolemaic heavens, its details are often highly realistic. The huge ambit of its allegory is fortified, in short, by reality, by the tremendous fidelity of its physical and emotional details to those of our known world. Charon’s boat, as Dante boards it, sinks deeper into the river Acheron, the physics of our world haunting the underworld, alarming its chthonic citizenry. Hell, as a whole, even tracks as one dim and prolonged chamber, a dank cone whose light is “infected,” whose skies are starless as any modern city’s, and is nothing if not populated by vivid images—from wind-borne lustfuls and flame-tongued frauds to a shade holding aloft his own severed head as if it were a lantern. Even gravity is turned topsy-turvy in the dark room of the underworld, as the poet-wanderer learns, crawling from the depths to find that down is up and up down.
The camera obscura seems uniquely capable of reminding us, at some cellular level, of light’s essential restlessness, its animating transit: Every image it produces journeys rapidly, over whatever modest or extravagant distance, to reach us, and in so doing transgresses the threshold between “out there” and “in here.” Public and private spheres thus blur in the camera obscura, and its boundary-eliding images warp gorgeously on their journey to our senses: Here are scenes flipped upside down, like Dante’s underworld, like the fragile image that lives on the retina for that lightning-flash instant before the brain interprets it, makes it “mean.” So our apparatus of illusion reminds us of an essential phase in our visualization of reality—of the predecessor, in short, to the perceived “real.”
Perhaps, in this way, the camera obscura performs similarly to creative writing and art more broadly, rendering a representation of the external world as transfigured—but never deciphered—by an interior. Yet the images our shadowy chamber produces don’t enjoy—or should I say suffer?—the duration and fixity of a photograph or a text, and so we apprehend its productions less as an aesthetic claim on our attention and more as incident, a collision of ethereal image with material obstruction—a wave, in essence, hitting a wall.
All this leads me to wonder, how would our own writing change if we saw it, especially in the throes of its creation, as fleeting rather than fixed? How does our sense of permanence and perishability affect our creative impetus and the very nature of what we make? Perhaps the camera obscura, in its sublime transit and transformation, its odd fusion of ephemerality and fidelity, can teach us something about the role of distortion in capturing “the real,” can attune us to the moment, the scene, that perpetually precedes our interpretation of it.
Devon Walker-Figueroa is the author of Philomath (Milkweed Editions, 2021) and the forthcoming collection Lazarus Species (Milkweed Editions, 2025). Her writing can be found in Poetry, the Nation, Ploughshares, and elsewhere.
