One of my earliest and most perplexing encounters with photography happened while I was a kid growing up in the country. My sister and her friends organized a summer camp of sorts, as a way to offer structure, I guess, to an otherwise carefree three month holiday. It was an honorable plan. The only problem was that it happened at school – the last place anyone wanted to be between the end of June and beginning of September.

After several days making papier maché hand puppets and putting on plays, it was time to procure my own fun. At the back of the classroom was a closet that contained assorted boardgames, brooms, dust pans and lots of extra chalk. My friend Randy and I would spend part of the afternoon inside that room playing “Masterpiece” – a Parker Brothers board game that pitted wealthy art dealers against each other at a fictional auction house.

It was often difficult to see what we were doing at first because the only source of light came through a plum-sized hole in the door. Eventually, after a few minutes, our eyes adjusted well enough to properly distinguish between the card sized paintings of Vermeer, Constable and Rembrandt.

While waiting for Randy to take his turn (and hopefully purchase a forgery), I looked towards the back of the closet and saw on the wall a blurry, moving picture of the other students in the classroom. As if that wasn’t peculiar enough, the image was also upside-down. We were both completely transfixed by this inexplicable projection. Though dumbfounded, it was also thrilling to witness something that neither of us could rationalize – at least not then.

An illustration depicting a camera obscura

It wasn’t until many years later, while studying the history of photography at university in Montreal that I discovered we had been sitting inside a camera obscura or dark chamber – a device used, coincidentally, by artists like Johannes Vermeer to help render their paintings.

Some say knowledge is power, but maybe too much knowledge can end up spoiling a perfectly good mystery.