far more technically inclined than ancient Greece.
Realist paintings became the artistic standard of the
fifteenth century, but classical perspective was dif-
ficult to achieve with manual tools. By the end of
the sixteenth century, Italian inventors had com-
bined the primitive camera obscura used by scien-
tists with the lens, which had been invented in the
thirteenth century. Inserting a lens into the aperture
of a camera created a device that was useful to paint-
ers, draughtsmen, and documentarians. Demand
for the device was high, stimulating a succession of
innovation in cameras and image-making that con-
tinues unabated to this day. Acting through the
camera, optics has become a primary mode of com-
munication in late industrial civilization.
The relationship between photography and optics
accounts for the multiple understandings we attach
to photographs. There is no question that photo-
graphs are physical artifacts formed by natural, that
is, technological, processes. As mentioned previously,
a manual tradition of mathematical representation
has supported the activities of urban civilizations for
millennia. The tools of surveying, cartography, and
perspectival painting generated images that contain
roughly the same information as a photograph.
Renaissance artisans introduced new technologies
to simplify the intense calculation and drafting skills
required by these manual technologies, and the cam-
era obscura was the most notable of these devices.
Over a period of 400 years, improvements in lenses
and advances in chemistry allowed the introduction
of photography, a technology that automated the
production of optical representations.
As a society we invest heavy symbolic value into
the optical mode of production. Unlike manual
forms of representation, which bear the foibles of
their creators, photographs are a form of truth, the
products of surrogate eyes, and they possess indus-
trial qualities that seem quintessentially modern.
But making photography an emblem of modernity
belies the Classical, even archaic, origins of optics.
While photography is a modern invention, it lies at
the end of a chain of development in mathematical
imagery that began with the earliest civilizations.
Mathematically accurate representation is a vital
component of any hierarchical urban society, and
the emergence of photography in modern civiliza-
tion is symptomatic of a continuum of develop-
ment, not a break with the past. It is then more
accurate to say that photography was a quintessen-
tially nineteenth century invention: it automated
a process that had traditionally been performed
by skilled labor. Like locomotives, cotton gins,
and mills, photography is a product of the In-
dustrial Revolution, but it is based on processes
that were introduced at a much earlier stage of hu-
man development.
The optical qualities of photography give the
medium a magical feel. Cameras form images with-
out intervention, and photographic images recreate
our environment with tremendous accuracy. Such
qualities seem without precedent in earlier technol-
ogies, but the background for such a device is actu-
ally quite intimate: it lies within our eyes, and it is
explained by the unusual status of Classical optics.
Classical optics is a physical science, grounded in
mathematics, and it is closely related to geometry,
cartography, and astronomy. But, unlike its sister
disciplines, it has a phenomenological component
because it describes how things appear to our per-
ceptual faculties. It translates between subjective
and objective fields of representation, and it pro-
vides a basis for creating technologies of percep-
tion, that is, automated systems of representation
like photography. Euclid and his successors des-
cribed the appearance of things through a set of
theorems that could be embedded in practices like
perspectival drawing. With the discovery of the
pinhole effect, the phenomenon that forms images
in cameras, followed by lenses, it was possible to
largely automate the process of picture-making.
Much like how tools enhance human strength,
cameras amplify vision. Optics is thus equal parts
physics, physiology, and psychology. The discipline
describes the behavior of light, but it does so in the
context of perception, since nature has evolved an
optical device—the eye—for animals to access their
environment. Eyes and cameras are a prime exam-
ple of convergent evolution, which explains why
photographs look real. Like levers and pulleys,
they use physical principles—the amplification
and documentation of light—to extend our powers
of perception. Our awareness of the visible world is
based on optics, and photographs, like experiences
they resemble, are a form of perception.
The optical paradigms developed by Euclid
dominated the study of light and vision until the
modern era. They were essentially a phenomenol-
ogy. While they described the behavior of light in
the eye with some accuracy, they neither offered a
general theory of light, nor did they explain image
formation in the eye and its transmission to the
brain. Classical theory reached its peak in the
work of Johannes Kepler, the first thinker to rigor-
ously explain how eyes exploit the pinhole effect to
form images. Kepler did not proceed to make the
obvious comparison between eyes and cameras
because he realized that a considerable amount of
work needed to be done in the physiology of vision.
After Kepler’s breakthroughs, scientists like ReneOPTICS