Techniques of the Observer
Book description
Jonathan Crary's Techniques of the Observer provides a dramatically new perspective on the visual culture of the nineteenth century, reassessing problems of both visual modernism and social modernity. This analysis of the historical formation of the observer is a compelling account of the prehistory of the society of the spectacle.…
Why read it?
1 author picked Techniques of the Observer as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
Crary’s work provides a theoretical and empirically informed synthesis of the work of theorists like Berger, Debord, Baudrillard, Barthes, and Sontag. Like these earlier writers, the technological transformations of visual culture are at the heart of the social transformations of the modern world. To understand modernity is thus first to make sense of its visual logics, procedures, and practices. This general argument allowed the author to enter the granular historical details of how seeing and 'observation’ have become essential to the concerns of modern life. What he calls 'techniques of the observer’ are in fact the core sensory apparatus that…
From Barry's list on beginning the study of visual culture.
If you love Techniques of the Observer...
The Bloomsbury Photographs
An enthralling portrait of the Bloomsbury Group’s key figures told through a rich collection of intimate photographs. Photography framed the world of the Bloomsbury Group. The thousands of photographs surviving in albums kept by Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, and Lytton Strachey, among others, today offer us a private…
Want books like Techniques of the Observer?
Our community of 12,000+ authors has personally recommended 100 books like Techniques of the Observer.
Share your top 3 reads of 2024!
And get a beautiful page showing off your 3 favorite reads.
1,593
readers submitted
so far, will you?
