Simpkins, Nigel

English

Portsmouth University Research Portal (Pure)

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In a Darkened Room: reflecting on the  
negated interior 
#negated RESEARCH 
 
Nigel Simpkins
Nigel Simpkins is senior lecturer and programme lead for Design: Culture and Society at the 
University of  Central Lancashire 
NBSimpkins@uclan.ac.uk
Abstract
This paper explores the idea of the photograph as both revealing and concealing 
of its own interior origins, asking whether the camera obscura’s interiority is useful 
in understanding changes in our relationship with the city. I explore exterior/inner/
interior interactions, firstly from the subjective, bodily experience of a camera obscura 
in Tavira Portugal; a detached and voyeuristic view which renders the outside close 
yet strangely distant. Secondly, by juxtaposing the camera obscura with Rachel 
Whiteread’s Water Tower, I examine the paradox of an interior which, in changing  
the way the city is viewed, has simultaneously contributed to its own hiddenness.
Introduction
Design: Culture and Society is a three-year history and theory programme at the 
University of  Central Lancashire, aimed at giving students of  Interior and Product 
Design and Visual Communications a critical approach to design. Starting from 
spaces and objects, projects explore intersections between different disciplinary 
contexts. As an interior designer and educator, I have developed the programme 
to show how the interior in a broad sense can inform multiple disciplinary fields.
In this instance, interior is explored through its connection with the photographic 
image, examining how spatial engagement with the city through the camera obscura 
enabled a distancing between subject and object that led to the interior being negated, 
subsumed into the image itself.
Figure 1: converted water tower, Tavira, Portugal, ‘seeing without being seen’. (Photograph Nigel Simpkins)
A version of  this paper was delivered to second year design students and formed the 
basis of  seminar discussions about the dominance of  the image in the modern city.
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The eagerly awaited moment of  reveal is met with exclamations as the overhead 
mirror is uncovered to project a bright image of  the city outside onto the surface of  
the disc, served up as though on an illuminated platter[Figure 2]. At first glance, the 
image is strangely distorted and still. There is no sound, no sense of  the heat outside, 
no smell, no pollution; the town below takes on a strange, detached quality, watched 
over by the camera’s eye; seeing without being seen.
There is another disused water tower whose interior marks a changing view of  
the city. This tank, high above the streets of  Soho in New York, was cast by artist 
Rachel Whiteread as a double of  its own interior, revealing more than just the 
negated volume of  its hidden chamber. The tank was once part of  a high level 
urban landscape, that together with other similar structures, formed part of  a system 
that supplied the city below. By inverting the space of  the tank in translucent resin, 
Whiteread recalls memories of  the people it once served; a ghostly presence cast in 
light against the bright sky.[1]
These two water towers have been remade to contain and reveal aspects of  the city 
through their own interiors. Each one carries in its essential interior condition a link 
between the observer and city, outer world and inner thought. In both conditions, 
the interior plays a dual role of  concealment and revealing. As both physical and 
metaphorical space, the interior reveals the city, whilst obscuring itself.
There is an uncanny quality to both examples that, in their doubling of  the interior, 
recalls the Surrealist claim that the city could be changed by changing the way 
we look at it. Finding strange and disquieting qualities in everyday settings, the 
Surrealist project was to find new ways to look at the world by opening routes to the 
unconscious. In that quest, the interior often features, not only as the location of  the 
familiar and the uncanny, but also as a spatial metaphor linking the outer world and 
the inner mind.
The ability of  photographs to capture atmosphere was discussed by Walter Benjamin, 
who noted the eerie qualities of  emptied spaces, doors and passages in Eugene 
Atget’s photographs of  Paris. Benjamin saw a strange emptiness in these pictures 
Figure 2: the camera obscura’s dark interior creates an eerily detached sense of  the silent city below. 
(Photograph Nigel Simpkins)
The town of  Tavira in Portugal is overlooked by a water tower, now disused, its empty 
tank repurposed as a camera obscura [Figure 1]. High above the heat of  the winding 
streets, I enter the converted cistern, plunged suddenly from bright sunlight into the 
dark shadow of  the chamber. It is cold inside, and as my eyes adjust, I can just make 
out a large circular disc in the centre, watched by a dozen other people gathered 
around its darkened surface.
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that went beyond the rational, documentary capabilities of  the medium and into the 
subject’s memories[2], a projection of  inner thoughts onto the photographic image that 
connects to a sense of  interiority.
From Darkness to Light
Figure 3: The darkened room of  the camera obscura became a useful model for the workings of  the eye … 
(Athanasius Kircher [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons)
About a hundred years before photography enabled images to be recorded, the 
camera obscura had been a popular spectacle that opened new ways to see the city 
[Figure 3]. Its popularity gave expression to an emerging visual society and it is often 
suggested that the camera obscura’s optical arrangement led to the development of 
photography. While it is true that the principle of projecting an image onto the wall 
of a darkened room is similar to that used by a modern camera, there were crucial 
differences, not least in the fleeting glimpse generated by the camera obscura’s 
inability to record the image.
The camera obscura also became a useful model in the early nineteenth century 
for explaining how the human visual apparatus was believed to work, such that 
it became a paradigm for understanding the eye and the importance of the sense 
of vision. Jonathan Crary locates a key shift in the status of the observer in the 
Cartesian separation of mind and body in which vision was believed to be the 
primary sense for receiving information from the outside world [3][Figure 4]. As an 
explanatory model for the way the human eye works, the camera obscura became 
significant not only for helping to explain the sense of vision, but also as a metaphor 
for connection between the mind and the outside world, representing, as Crary puts 
it, ‘… the most rational possibilities of a perceiver within the increasingly dynamic 
disorder of the world on which human knowledge is based, mediating the outside 
world with the inner mind.’ [4]
There is something reassuring about the use of an historic model as metaphor for 
unfamiliar, contemporary phenomena. In the rapidly expanding city of the nineteenth 
century, for example, the camera obscura’s comforting enclosure presented a useful 
analogy for commentators to discuss public anxiety about the complexities of urban 
life. In Pierce Egan’s 1821 account of London life, Life in London, the author uses the 
idea of camera obscura as a metaphor for framing the city, a trope through which to 
view the city’s dangers from a detached and safe place.[5] [Figure 5]
‘The author has chosen for his readers a Camera Obscura view of  London, not only 
from its safety, but because it is so snug, and also possesses the invaluable advantage of  
seeing and not being seen.’ [6]
Figure 4: … and later as an interior 
spatial metaphor connecting the outer world 
and inner thought. Increasing emphasis on the 
scopic realm suppressed the interior nature of  
the image beneath the image itself. ‘Descartes: 
A Treatise on the formation of  the foetus’ . 
(Wellcome Collection, CC BY)
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Beyond its function as a visual apparatus, the camera obscura’s view from interior to 
external world provided a device for the writer and reader to imagine life in the city. 
To observe in this way depended on the body’s presence, mediated by the interior 
space of  the camera, to create a distance between subject and object. The voyeuristic 
relationship represented in Egan’s account showed how the interior viewpoint of  
the device provided a view of  the city, in which the position of  the observer was 
recognised, separate and unseen.
From an interior perspective, the darkened room can be seen as more than a means 
to view the outside world; it also presents a re-ordering of  the relationship between 
viewer and viewed world, where the observer is simultaneously isolated from the 
outside world, whilst remaining visually connected. As Crary puts it, ‘an observer 
is isolated, enclosed and autonomous within (the camera obscura’s) dark confines, 
it is thus inseparable from a certain metaphysic of  interiority.’[7]
Although the camera obscura provided a useful model to illustrate this shift in the 
status of  the observer, its prominence as a literary trope declined in the nineteenth 
century. As rational scientific knowledge replaced the use of  metaphorical example, 
so the camera obscura’s ability to represent the eye and to act as a metaphorical link 
between external world and inner thought, was superseded by the emerging language 
of  psychological discovery, reframing discussion about the interaction of  outer 
perception and inner mind.
The use of  both city and interior as metaphors for the workings of  the mind, was 
anticipated to some extent by the interior condition inherent to the camera obscura. 
The Surrealists presented an interpretation of  modernism that explored the irrational 
alongside the rational, often using photography to explore links between city and 
mind. As previously noted, Atget’s photographs of  thresholds and doorways were 
cited by Benjamin for their portrayal of  a surreal sensibility in exploring boundaries 
between interior and exterior that coincided with the development of  psychoanalysis, 
noting that,
‘… no face is Surrealistic to the same degree as the true face of  a city. No picture 
by de Chirico or Max Ernst can match the sharp elevations of  the city’s inner 
strongholds…’ [8]
As the photograph superseded the camera obscura, it seems that its connective 
spatial model changed. Beatriz Colomina suggests that the interiority on which that 
apparatus depends had become subsumed into the image itself  as the negative within 
the camera became indistinguishable from the printed, externalised picture.[9]
Figure 5: ‘Tom Getting the Best of  a Charley’, Pierce Egan’s London Life used the literary trope of  the camera 
obscura to portray the rapidly changing city from a detached and safe viewpoint. (© British Library Board, 
838.i.2., opp.page 232).
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Not only does the camera obscura connect visually between the interior and exterior, 
but it also opens up an analogy between the outer world and inner thought, processes 
in which the strange and irrational come to the surface. The blurring of  boundaries 
between reality and imagination that the interior view provides, can create a disturbing 
experience in the processing of  inner thoughts and memories. The eerie sense of  silent 
movement projected onto the camera obscura’s surface, heightened by the “cosy”, 
quasi-homely atmosphere of  the darkened chamber, instils a quality, consistent with 
encounters with the everyday in which the familiar takes on a strange sense of  its 
opposite, the uncanny[10].
Following the Surrealist notion that the city can be changed by the way we look at 
it, I return to the two water towers for their capacity to show the interior as a bridge 
between outside and inside. In the rooftop perspective afforded by Whiteread’s water 
tower, the cast of  the tank’s inner space is turned inside out. Set alongside the outward 
faces of  its neighbouring cisterns, this interior gestures towards now obscured memories.
Similarly, the camera obscura at Tavira shows how the inside of  the city has become 
obscured in urban discourse by the visual apparatus that purportedly displaced 
it. Is it that photography, rather than simply evolving from the camera obscura, 
created a different sense of  space in which the interior becomes subsumed into the 
photographic image; where the interior, disappears in its own representation?[11]
Reflecting in the Dark
As the mirror is once again obscured, the room darkens and I am left to reflect on the 
camera obscura’s ability to reveal the city to the observer who engages spatially with 
a reflection of  the world. The interior condition, in both its physical and metaphorical 
forms, has the capacity to mediate between the inner mind and the outer world.
Investigation of, and through, the interior can move us towards an imaginary and 
atmospheric city triggered by inner memories. In pursuing the goal of  new interior 
knowledge, conception of  the interior for its doubled state opens possibilities for the 
negative to reveal something that the scopic realm has kept hidden. A photograph 
can convey an atmosphere and trigger an emotional response just as the cast 
impression of  an interior is able to convey the memory of  its past. By distancing 
subject from object, the photograph and the cast reconnect with inner worlds that 
are both strange and familiar, yet hidden.
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Notes & Citations
1. Brian Dillon, “The Dream Site”, Rachel Whiteread. (London: Tate Publishing, 2014).
2. Dana MacFarlane, “Photography at the Threshold: Atget, Benjamin and 
Surrealism”. History of  Photography 34, no. 1 (2010), 17-28.
3. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of  the observer: On vision and modernity in the nineteenth 
century, (MIT Press, 1992), 16.
4. Ibid., 53.
5. John Plunkett, “Optical Recreations and Victorian Literature”. Essays and Studies, 
Literature and the Visual Media 58, (London, 2005), 1.
6. Pierce Egan, Life in London: Or, The Day and Night Scenes of  Jerry Hawthorn, Esq. and 
His Elegant Friend Corinthian Tom in Their Rambles and Sprees Through the Metropolis, 
(John Camden Hotten, 1884).
7. Ibid.
8. Macfarlane, “Photography at the Threshold”.
9. Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity, Modern Architecture as Mass Media, 
(MIT Press, 1994), 80.
10. Petra Eckhard, “Chronotopes of  the Uncanny: Time and Space in Postmodern 
New York Novels—Paul Auster’s City of  Glass and Toni Morrison’s Jazz”. 
KronoScope 16, no. 1 (2016).
11. Colomina, Privacy and Publicity, 82.
Bibliography
1. Colomina, Beatriz. Privacy and Publicity, Modern Architecture as Mass Media. MIT 
Press, 1994.
2. Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of  the observer: On vision and modernity in the nineteenth 
Century. MIT Press, 1992.
3. Egan, Pierce. Life in London: Or, The Day and Night Scenes of  Jerry Hawthorn, Esq. and 
His Elegant Friend Corinthian Tom in Their Rambles and Sprees Through the Metropolis. 
John Camden Hotten, 1884.
4. Seed, David . Literature and the Visual Media. D.S.Brewer: London, 2005.


In a darkened room:reflections on the negated interior

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In a darkened room:reflections on the negated interior

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