Cave Drawings

Back in college, I attended at least 4 classes that started their curriculum with cave drawings. For Art History, Graphic Design History, and Comics (visual story telling in progression), it’s not hard to see how these relate.

But a photography professor had to be a little more creative with the connection. The professor made the argument that anyone in a dark cave closed up for the winter would have to poke a finger through the entrance to get out. This would create an accidental camera obscura, a pinhole camera, throwing an inverted image of the outside world onto the back wall.

Whether or not this really happened doesn’t really matter; I like the story.

Who doesn’t want to argue that their chosen study is something intrinsic to all of us, universal to the human experience? It’s romantic. It’s a shared inheritance. A curse, we can’t help but live out again and again. What we do exists on a continuum of what has been done.

There is a direct lineage from the cave hand stencils to the self-portraits of Vincent and Frida to the selfie. “I was here.”