Montage ‘in the wild’ may be discovered in the intriguing, often amusing, superimposition in a glass pane, when conditions allow, so that we may look through the transparent plane and, simultaneously, see a reflection in it of something else, so that both views relate in some way.

Who better to demonstrate that than posthumously popular Saul Leiter (1923-2013) whose street photography amongst the acres of glass lining New York canyons allowed him ample opportunity to make Assemblages, which is incidentally the title of a show of his work (to 24 September) during the Rencontres d’Arles, following this recent exhibition at Bunkamura Museum of Art in Japan (where his work is so popular, they’ve coined a name for images like it) which closed only a week ago on 23 August.

The words ‘SPECTACULAR SHOW’ orphan the grisaille reflection of Mary’s head and her distrait expression from the more vivid collision of her hands with the harsh masculine silhouettes of passers-by. It is his attention to the elision of reflected and obscured—which normally we gloss over as mere distraction—that is his muse.

His 1959 self-portrait compounds the effect by framing more than one sliver of mirror amongst the window reflections so that artificial flowers float, poetically reanimated, against the mundanity of a fire hydrant rooted in the cracked pavement.

Such layerings of reflection and transparency would have been observed by William Hyde Wollaston (1766–1828) who lived through the late 18th century when  polished plate glass appeared in Britain, manufactured by the casting of molten glass on a table to be ground and polished by hand, by which large panes of very good quality glass could be produced. A very expensive process, it was generally only used for the windows of the best rooms in grand mansions, while others had to be content with archaic leadlights or smaller blown-glass panes. At the beginning of the 19th century steam-power made the process more economical, then in 1834 a German cylinder sheet process produced much larger sheets of good quality glass. The withdrawal of the UK duty on glass in 1845 brought a price drop of 75% and increased demand.

The semi-mirror effect was surely noticed in the sophisticated glass made by the Romans, so could be exploited much earlier, as David Hockney surmises, by artists in tracing a scene reflected in a small glass set at a 45º angle held above their drawing paper ( the result would be reversed and inverted).

Wollaston, while on a walking holiday in the Lakes District of England, became frustrated with his attempts to draw the landscape. Inspired by what he saw in a broken shaving mirror, and applying his knowledge of optics, he designed the camera lucida as a drawing aid. Although it was not patented and available commercially until 1807, it is probable, according to Hans W. Lack, that botanist Ferdinand Bauer used a prototype of it on his voyages in Australia with Matthew Flinders.

The camera lucida joins, on the path to photography, that optical prosthesis, the lens, used in the camera obscura, the more cumbersome ‘drawing machine.’ In the latter, the image was thus received second-hand with its resulting defects and aberrations. The Scots Magazine of 1807 compares the two instruments;

In the Camera Obscura, all objects that are not situated near the center of view are more or less distorted; but in the Camera Lucida there is no distortion, so that every line, even the most remote from the centre of view, is as straight as those which pass through the centre. In the Camera Obscura the field of view does not extend to more than 30 or 35 degrees with distinctness; but in the Camera Lucida as much as 70º or 80° may be included in one view.

Contemporaries pointed out its pocketable portability as a further convenience, but agreed that the greatest is that though myopics might need their glasses or a lens attachment no lens is employed; this particularly at a stage when lenses in general were distrusted, as Andrés Mario Zervigón details in his essay ‘Visible Yet Transparent: The Lens in Nineteenth-Century Photographic Cultures’ for the latest edition of Critical Inquiry. He points out their potential role in composing the form and look of a photograph, indiscernible to everyone but the lens technician and photographic aficionado, in which he enlists A. D. Coleman‘s observation in “Lentil Soup: A Mediation on Lens Culture,” (in Depth of Field: Essays on Photography, Mass Media, and Lens Culture) that as

an instrument of visual communication, the [photographic] lens is unique in that, for all practical purposes, it is literally as well as metaphorically invisible. Made (most commonly) of glass, or some other transparent substance, it is not in itself seen during the process of image encoding, transmission, and decoding; rather, it is seen through.

During the 19th century, multiple lens makers contributed to the evolution of lens design, collectively pushing the boundaries of optical technology to align photography with the ideal of “transparent” representation by controlling what came to be known as aberrations…that is, any departure from what was accorded the ‘normal’ or expected appearance. Seven primary aberrations were identified and defined in the 1850s by Philipp Ludwig von Seidel (1821–1896). The major issue is that in photography the lens must form an image on a flat plane, and it is plain to see why that results in a curved field…

Engineer and mathematician Joseph Petzval (1807-91) reduced the problem to a mathematical formula; the Petzval sum. Early lens designs before c.1885 offset the curvature by introducing overcorrected astigmatism to flatten it at the film plane, but causing focus to curve at the subject. In a portrait lens providing a wide aperture to reduce exposure times, this introduced a vignetted, halo effect that Zervigón points out was   valued as ‘artistic’ but at odds with the desire for ‘real’ perspective and overall focus. A remedy was to seat any row of people being photographed in a semi-circle, or in the case of landscape to frame the view with closer elements, at the sides of the image, which would be rendered sharp.

It was Ernst Abbe (1840–1905) and Friedrich Otto Schott (1851–1935) in Jena who developed barium crown glass that reduced the Petzval sum, and the innovation was applied by Hugo Schroeder (1834–1903) in his Ross Concentric lens. However, the low aperture of the Concentric was a severe limitation, and in 1890 Paul Rudolph (1858 – 1935) of Zeiss succeeded in correcting the spherical aberration of a new-achromat landscape lens by the addition of a low power aberration corrector in front of the stop, a combination of an old-achromat front component with a new-achromat rear component, which he called the Anastigmat. The Series I lens with an aperture of f/4.5 was intended for portraiture, and the Series V f/18 lens covered an exceptionally wide angle for landscape and architecture.

Like its physical construction balancing positive and negative lens elements, the word Anastigmat is actually a double negative. The Greek word stigma means a point and, of course, the image of a point should be a point. The word ‘A-stigmatism’ means a no-point, or imperfect definition, and ‘An-a-stigmat’ means a no-no-point, and hence good definition. An image free from astigmatism is said to be Stigmatic, and only if this image falls on flat plane is it called Anastigmatic.

That returns us to the issue of the flat plane.

The camera is so often referred to as an artificial eye; François Arago, advocate for Daguerre’s invention, described photography thus, and as a superior “objective retina,” a concept widely repeated then in France. Talbot more specifically described the lens as an eye and the sensitised negative as a retina. At the inception of photography, intricate aspects of the technology fade behind vague ideas of the natural world in such associations of the human-made camera with the human eye. In a process of ‘naturalisation’ this portrayal positioned photography as inherently similar to the visual abilities bestowed upon humanity by the natural world, albeit with an expectation of detached objectivity and heightened precision.

However, unlike the camera (i.e. a box-like ‘room’ of flat planes), the human eye has a spherical geometry, a semi-spherical photo-sensitive retina and simple but adaptive optics. They feature a wide field-of-view, low aberration, excellent adaptivity, and preprocessing of perceived visual information. Furthermore, we use two of them in train, to enhance our perception of depth and movement.

The fabrication of spherical artificial eyes is exciting attention in current fields of robotics and machine vision. Two recent research publications report developments; Gil Ju Lee, Changsoon Choi, Dae-Hyeong Kim, and Young Min Song published their ambition for ‘Bioinspired Artificial Eyes: Optic Components, Digital Cameras, and Visual Prostheses’ in Advanced Functional Materials in 2018, while in March this year the group Zhenghao Long, Xiao Qiu, Chak Lam Jonathan Chan, Zhibo Sun, Zhengnan Yuan, Swapnadeep Poddar, Yuting Zhang, Yucheng Ding, Leilei Gu, Yu Zhou, Wenying Tang, Abhishek Kumar Srivastava, Cunjiang Yu, Xuming Zou, Guozhen Shen & Zhiyong Fan published  in Nature Communications their design and implementation of a hemispherical bionic retina and spherical eye device addressing the missing capabilities of colour vision, optical adaptivity, and energy efficiency in the previous research. These bionic eyes feature filter-free colour vision, neuromorphic preprocessing, and adaptive optics.

Camera lucida is a misnomer. Regardless of the type, it is not a camera but merely means of conveying two images simultaneously to the eye; if there is a ‘room’ it is either inside the prism, the eye, or the brain. Let David Hockney describe that experience;

The camera lucida is not easy to use. Basically, it is a prism on a stick that creates the illusion of an image of whatever is in front of it on a piece of paper below. This image is not real…when you look through the prism from a single point you can see the person or objects in front and the paper below at the same time. If you’re using the camera lucida to draw, you can also see your hand and pencil making marks on the paper. But only you, sitting in the right position, can see these things, no one else can. Because it is portable and can be carried anywhere, the camera lucida is perfect for drawing landscapes. But portraiture is more difficult. You must use it quickly, for once the eye has moved the image is really lost. A skilled artist could make quick notations, marking the key points of the subject’s features. In effect, this is a fast forward of the normal measuring process that takes place in the head of a good draughtsman but which usually takes much longer. After these notations have been made, the hard work begins of observing from life and translating the marks into a more complete form. I tried to use the camera lucida myself for a year, drawing hundreds of portraits with it, including those of the National Gallery guards.

I would never claim that my drawing is as good as Hockney’s, and I agree with him that this is a difficult little instrument to use. Though much out of practice, by making a few attempts with my own lucida recently, I have one image made today that reveals how it transfers depth effects onto a flat sheet of paper. This quick sketch of a small indoor plant about half a metre from my eye took me a mere 10 minutes. Without the device it would have taken me more than an hour to deal with this complex subject and its surrounds.

It requires no more effort to draw the subject than to sketch in the table edge, window blind and a glimpse of the stone wall outside as everything appears equally in focus since the eye seamlessly accommodates automatically. One must slightly move head and eye to follow that narrow band in which both pencil-tips and the subject overlap, so that is a constant adjustment.

However, the internal details of these dark leaves are too hard to see to be able to accurately use tone; that is best done, as Hockney would say, by ‘eye-balling’ the subject, and reasonably easy since the outlines are in place.  Of interest is the bottom of this image, where the curvature of the base of the ramekin containing the plastic pot is stretched by the steep angle at which I am peering down into the prism. On removing my eye from the device and without moving my head and looking down at the drawing, the perspective exaggeration disappears at that point of view.

This accords with optical scientist Maurice Henri Pirenne’s 1960s experiments with pinhole cameras (again, no lens)

Pinhole photograph of a balustrade on the roof of the Church of St Ignazio in Rome, from M. H. Pirenne, Optics, painting & photography. The University Press, Cambridge, 1970These show (above, and below, left) a similar deformation at the edge of the field when conveying a wide-angle view at close range compared with those made  at a greater range (below, right)

These experiments accord with Zervigón’s position that with efforts to control lens aberrations, distortion, and other optical issues, photography apparently met the ideal of objective, “transparent” representation, and yet its product was invisibly imprinted with social and aesthetic biases. He quotes Australian photohisotrian Geoffrey Batchen who remarks that the manipulated photograph;

can hardly be blamed on the advent of digitalisation. The history of photography is already full of images that have been manipulated in some way or another. In fact, it could be argued that photography is nothing but that history […] every photograph involves practices of intervention and manipulation. Geoffrey Batchen, “Ectoplasm: Photography in the Digital Age,” in OverExposed: Essays on Contemporary Photography, ed. Squiers (New York, 1999)

Even without a lens, it is generally agreed that the camera lucida warrants an equal place with the camera obscura in the proto-history of photography but, I argue, untainted by the sense that its imagery is seen neither ‘through a glass darkly’ or through the ‘rose-coloured glasses’ that Zervigón evokes. Before pictures from the camera could ‘draw themselves’ both instruments enabled the pencil to trace more exactly what the eye saw. There are some, early in Australia, whose use of the lucida vouches for this, and both before and after the invention of photography, since for some time the medium was cumbersome, while the camera lucida was portable.

Captain James Wallis (1785–1858), commander of the 46th Regiment that arrived in Sydney in February 1814, advertised a “series of original views in New South Wales” in the Sydney Gazette on January 9, 1819;  prints copper-engraved by W. Preston. This watercolour is loosely connected to Plate One in “An Historical Account of the Colony of New South Wales,” Wallis’s own 1821 publication from London. The scene is the Hawkesbury River, one of the colony’s prominent waterways, which supplied essential food and grain to Sydney. Inscribed “with camera lucida” it is the earliest known Australian painting using the instrument. Its provenance sets Wallis as an independent artist, a vital figure in colonial art, transcending his role as an organiser and publisher. Unlike other drawings made without its aid, lucida images are recognisable by the rendition of distant mountains, like the Blue Mountains here, at an unexaggerated scale, when in the experience of viewing them with the naked eye they might appear to be towering. The result is that it is easy, but for the outlines, to imagine this as a delicately hand-coloured photograph.

Victoria’s first surveyor-general Robert Hoddle (1794–1881) made maps that are professional, but with crudely drawn, out-of-scale people and animals added to enliven otherwise prosaic, precise views, while those of his landscapes done with the aid of a camera lucida are more accurate transcriptions.

American-born topographical painter, author and army officer James Pattison Cockburn was welcomed on his brief visit to the colony of New South Wales by Lady Aylmer, the governor’s wife, as ‘one of the most accurate and Elegant Artists I have ever met’

Another American, the naturalist Joseph Drayton (active c.1820s-1858) using the camera lucida listed in the ship’s manifest as part of his equipment, made topographical views and detailed coloured drawings of natural history specimens during the United States Exploring Expedition under Charles Wilkes in Sydney from November 1839 to February 1840.

On 30 July 1841, Samuel Jackson, architect of Scots Church at the corner of Collins and Russell streets, seated inside a revolving barrel set on the unroofed walls using a lucida, drew a 360º Panoramic Sketch of Melbourne Port Phillip from the walls of Scots Church on the Eastern hill   measuring 5.48 m x 45.7 cm. A detail below reveals in his human figures and other moving subjects, that his skills at freehand drawing are only basic, but with the aid of the device, the jumbled complex of buildings are handled with accuracy. Fifty years later director of Melbourne’s Theatre Royal John Hennings made a painted a copy of Jackson’s panorama which was hung in the Exhibition Building on 23 September 1892, remaining there until the 1920s. His interpretation exaggerates topography and romanticises the scene.

The precision of the camera lucida is evidenced in its use in the military. French officer Aimé Laussedat (1819-1907) considered the “father of photogrammetry” was first to use photographic images for topographic surveys as early as 1861. However that was founded on a technique using drawn perspective views of landscapes.

His aim was to replace the traditional direct, tedious and imprecise topographic measuring on the ground, by remote measurements made more holistically through perspective views—initially hand-made drawings done with a camera lucida and later, photographic images as suggested by Arago to promote the daguerreotype as early as 1839, but which Laussedat was unable to take up because the optical lenses were primitive, their angular field too narrow and the equipment too bulky.

The idea of using perspective views drawn by hand for surveying originated in Beautemps-Beaupré’s hydrographic engineering, but Laussedat improved on that by deploying multiple camera lucidae so that surveys could be carried out by soldiers without any help from artists.

Through surveys made on military fortifications of Mont Valérien, Fort de Vincennes he proved his method, calling it iconometry, which he was to employ twenty years later during the Franco-Prussian War to determine enemy positions with a telescope-mounted lucida (telemetrograph) and, following the French defeat, to to negotiate the detailed position of the border. He remarked in 1899 that;