The magic of the great camera obscura

Sunset, Feb, 1997 by Peter Fish

At Lands End, a chance to see the world anew

It sits at San Francisco's northwestern edge, where Lands End splinters into the Pacific. "Giant Camera," the sign reads. The building does indeed take the form of a box camera your grandmother might have used. It is painted a pale, Necco-wafer yellow.

Someone has tacked up fliers near the entrance: "Dramatic Re-Creation of Leonardo da Vinci's Original Camera Obscura! Well worth a buck!" You pay your buck, you walk inside. So absolute is the darkness, you feel you have stepped into your own coffin. This feeling does not last. There is the world you left behind - Lands End, Seal Rocks, the cold Pacific - revolving before you, not more beautiful than in real life, but more mysteriously whole.

"The camera obscura takes reality and removes it from itself," says David Warren, the San Franciscan who is the Giant Camera's most passionate defender. "You're able to focus more clearly on the image, see the true beauty of nature."

The Giant Camera has resided at Lands End since the 1940s and is one of the few remaining vestiges of the vanished amusement park Playland-at-the-Beach. But its bloodlines reach back hundreds of years: Eleventh-century Arab scholars knew the camera obscura's wonders, and versions of it appear in the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci. Art historians believe that adroit use of the camera obscura made possible the luminous realism of painters like Vermeer.

The camera's essence is simple: light enters through a pinhole on one side of a dark chamber (camera obscura in Latin), producing an upside-down image of the outside world on the chamber's opposite wall. Over the centuries, opticians added lenses to focus the light, and mirrors to direct the image downward off the wall and onto a round horizontal screen. Motors turned the lenses, so the picture revolved.

Popular tourist attractions in the 1700s and 1800s, camera obscuras haven't fared well in the 20th century. Warren knows of only one other publicly accessible example in the West, in Santa Monica. Even San Francisco's Giant Camera is vulnerable: in the 1980s, the National Park Service, which manages Lands End, proposed razing it. Warren founded FOCOS - Friends of the Camera Obscura Society - to fight the plan. FOCOS gathered 10,000 signatures; one member legally changed her name to Camera Obscura to advance the cause. (The park service relented. But it would still like to raze the camera building and move mirrors and lenses inside the nearby Cliff House, not understanding that the Giant Camera is perfect as it is.)

Not every tourist attraction inspires someone to change her name. But I understand the impulse. The camera obscura exerts a gravitational pull that does not easily let go. "For oh so many people," says Warren, "the camera serves as an anchor to which they return to see the world anew. It refreshes them and allows them to gain a clearer understanding through its reflective powers."

Yes. Yes.

A few Christmases ago, my father visited, bringing with him the woman he called "my new lady friend." My father and mother had been married 50 years, and they had been extraordinarily happy. Now he was a widower, and I would spend the holiday with a woman I had barely met.

My plan was to jam the weekend with so many activities there would be no time to think. My father's plan was to get the flu. He lay in bed surrounded by cough syrup bottles. Jackey and I were on our own. Gamely, we climbed Coit Tower, we rode cable cars. She was, is, a charming and vivacious woman, but the day grew interminable, and it was out of desperation that I drove west.

Lands End was nearly empty. But it was a winter afternoon so brilliant there was no intermediary between San Francisco and heaven. The Giant Camera was open.

"Here," I said. "We go in here."

Doubtful, she followed me inside. We waited in the dark. Then the image materialized: whitecapped and muscular, the Pacific lit by the setting sun.

"Oh," Jackey said. "This is wonderful!" And I knew everything would be all right.

Giant Camera, 1096 Point Lobos Ave., San Francisco; (415) 750-0415. Open 11 to sunset daily, weather permitting.

The Santa Monica camera obscura is at the Senior Recreation Center, 1450 Ocean Ave.; (310) 458-8644. Open 9 to 4 weekdays, 11 to 4 weekends; ask for a key inside the center.