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The Leggers share 1450 Ocean with one of the oldest residents on Santa Monica beach: The Camera Obscura. But what is it, and how did it get to 1450 Ocean?
A “Camera Obscura” is an optical trick that uses a pinhole to project images into a dark room (“Camera Obscura” is Latin for “Dark Room”). It’s an ancient technique (first mentioned in a Han Chinese manuscript from about 400 BCE) in which the pinhole allows light into the pitch-black room. The beam of light appears on the opposite wall as a projected picture (backwards and upside down) of the outside world. The one inside 1450 uses a sort of periscope arrangement, a wheel to turn the “pinhole,” and a plate-shaped surface for projection.
Our Santa Monica Camera Obscura is 120 years old. It was first constructed down on the beach by Robert F. Jones (nephew of Sen. John P. Jones, one of Santa Monica’s founders) and operated as a paid amusement. The curious could use the Camera Obscura to spy on folks on the beach by cranking the ship’s wheel for a 360 degree view. Jones gave it to the city in 1907, and in 1955 the city moved it to its current digs. It’s free to visit and open M-F 9am - 3pm & Saturday 11am - 4pm. Here’s a little video that’ll show you what you’ve been missing at 1450 Ocean -- though you really ought to check it out yourself!
While it’s sort of a quaint curio to us nowadays, the camera obscura has been generating fights in the art world recently thanks to a theory put about by renowned painter David Hockney (himself a devotee of L.A. sun and water) and physicist Charles Falco. The pair claim that many of the advances in Renaissance painting were due to secret use of the camera obscura and similar optical tricks. Needless to say, there are plenty of artists and art historians who hotly contest the idea that the Old Masters weren’t visionary geniuses. If you want to know more about this end of things, there’s a great documentary featuring Penn Jillette (of Penn and Teller fame) about a friend of his who used those techniques to recreate a painting by Vermeer. It’s a truly amazing story of persistence and obsession (something marathoners know a thing or two about) called TIM’S VERMEER. https://youtu.be/94pCNUu6qFY
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