camera [L17th] A camera was first a council, department, or legislative chamber in Italy and Spain. The word is borrowed from Latin, where it meant ‘vault or chamber’, and is also the source of chamber [ME]. In legal contexts the Latin phrase in camera [L19th] is used to mean ‘in the judge’s private chamber’ instead of in open court. The photography sense comes from the camera obscura (literally ‘dark chamber’), a device popular from the early 18th century for recording visual images. The first example of the modern sense comes in the 1840s.