We tend to think that people saw the world in a different way one hundred thousand, five hundred or ten years ago. ‘ Eyes have learnt to see’ , they learnt to recognise the elements of reality in more and more complicated transmissions, whatever form they take.
The exhibition focuses on some stages of this process. Our starting conception is that the invention of photography (as well as moving picture) is the final result of a long cultural historical ‘ learning’ process, in which Europeans got into a close relation with images, accepted and claimed the preservation of three-dimensional reality in two dimensions, as well as the imitation of the motion of reality. Representatives both of science (optics through the development of optical instruments) and popular culture (showmen, visual toys, entertaining activities) played an important part in this process. An image consumer of our age can hardly imagine the magic of pictures a few centuries ago. People, who encountered with pictures, paintings almost exclusively in the form of religious presentation, were affected by touchable pictures and the popularity of the performances of showmen is an evidence of a cultural transformation as significant as the Guttemberg-revolution of writing.
The exhibition presents the special collection of optical instruments of the Hungarian Museum of Photography as well as the objects related to optics from the National Museum and Library of Pedagogy and other public and private collections.
The laws of the vision, instruments presenting the principles of optics, pinhole photography, the history of projection from laterna magica to fairy tale slide-projector, different motion imitations, the visual imitation of space, the special effects provided by transparent pictures are all presented by the exhibition.