• Korean Association for Visual Culture
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• v.16
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• pp.131-161
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• 2010

This thesis investigates the cultural meanings of the first optical instrument, Camera obscura, in the pre-modern age, while it explains the development as well as the use of the Camera obscura in Europe and Korea. For this purpose the thesis traces the significant phases of the historical developments of the Camera obscura from L. da Vinci, G. B. della Porta, D. Barbaro, A. Kircher to J. Zahn etc. The Camera obscura was not only the symbolic instrument of the modernism in the sense that human being wanted to observe the outer world by himself and to be freed from the viewpoint of the christianity, but also was the forerunner of the modern visual culture, because it first time reproduced the artificial image of the natural world. Since the second half of the 17th century the box-type reflex Camera obscura had been produced, it began to be used as aid to drawing for painters like J. Vermeer, A. Canaletto and J. Reynolds etc. throughout Europe. It tells the evidence of the close relation between art and technology in the pre-modern age. Around the end of the 18th century the Camera obscura was brought to Korea, the closed country of the Fareast, by the scholars of the so-called 'Realist school' (Silhak-pa) who went to Beijing to acquire knowledges on the Western science from the European priests. In 1780s Yak-yong JUNG, one of the representative scholars of the Realist school, experimented the Camera obscura, and then, it was used for sketches of higher aristocrats' portraits by the supreme portrait painter of that time, Myoung-ki LEE. Those were possible only under the reign of the culturally liberal and reformative King, Jung-jo (ruled 1776-1800), and after his retreatment the inquiry of the Camera obscura had been dimished. It is not a historical coincidence that the Camera obscura could be examined and used in the period of the Enlightment both in Europe and Korea.