One of the precursors to actual photography was the camera obscura , in which a pinhole could be used to form an image on one wall of a darkened room or (later) a box. In their simplest form, these go back over 1,000 years — and if you’re lucky, you can occasionally find one to play with / in. Should you ever find yourself in the neighborhood, there’s a room-sized camera obscura at the Sherman Hines Museum of Photography in Liverpool, Nova Scotia. Although, as is generally the case with walk-in camera obscura, you can’t exactly point it:

So this is what you get if you photograph the image that the camera obscura has projected for you, inverted on the wall. A nice little historical view of the folks across the street…

BTW, Sherman Hines doesn’t get much press where I live (“south of the border”), but he’s a really impressive photographer — go check out some of his portraits and landscapes !