Looking Through Images

Looking Through Images PDF Author: Emmanuel Alloa
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231547579
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
Images have always stirred ambivalent reactions. Yet whether eliciting fascinated gazes or iconoclastic repulsion from their beholders, they have hardly ever been seen as true sources of knowledge. They were long viewed as mere appearances, placeholders for the things themselves or deceptive illusions. Today, the traditional critique of the spectacle has given way to an unconditional embrace of the visual. However, we still lack a persuasive theoretical account of how images work. Emmanuel Alloa retraces the history of Western attitudes toward the visual to propose a major rethinking of images as irreplaceable agents of our everyday engagement with the world. He examines how ideas of images and their powers have been constructed in Western humanities, art theory, and philosophy, developing a novel genealogy of both visual studies and the concept of the medium. Alloa reconstructs the earliest Western media theory—Aristotle’s concept of the diaphanous milieu of vision—and the significance of its subsequent erasure in the history of science. Ultimately, he argues for a historically informed phenomenology of images and visual media that explains why images are not simply referential depictions, windows onto the world. Instead, images constantly reactivate the power of appearing. As media of visualization, they allow things to appear that could not be visible except in and through these very material devices.

Looking Through Images

Looking Through Images PDF Author: Emmanuel Alloa
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231547579
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
Images have always stirred ambivalent reactions. Yet whether eliciting fascinated gazes or iconoclastic repulsion from their beholders, they have hardly ever been seen as true sources of knowledge. They were long viewed as mere appearances, placeholders for the things themselves or deceptive illusions. Today, the traditional critique of the spectacle has given way to an unconditional embrace of the visual. However, we still lack a persuasive theoretical account of how images work. Emmanuel Alloa retraces the history of Western attitudes toward the visual to propose a major rethinking of images as irreplaceable agents of our everyday engagement with the world. He examines how ideas of images and their powers have been constructed in Western humanities, art theory, and philosophy, developing a novel genealogy of both visual studies and the concept of the medium. Alloa reconstructs the earliest Western media theory—Aristotle’s concept of the diaphanous milieu of vision—and the significance of its subsequent erasure in the history of science. Ultimately, he argues for a historically informed phenomenology of images and visual media that explains why images are not simply referential depictions, windows onto the world. Instead, images constantly reactivate the power of appearing. As media of visualization, they allow things to appear that could not be visible except in and through these very material devices.

Thinking Through Images

Thinking Through Images PDF Author: Christopher Tilley
Publisher: Oxbow Books
ISBN: 1789257026
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 580

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Book Description
This book provides a general self-reflexive review and critical analysis of Scandinavian rock art from the standpoint of Chris Tilley’s research in this area over the last thirty years. It offers a novel alternative theoretical perspective stressing the significance of visual narrative structure and rhythm, using musical analogies, putting particular emphasis on the embodied perception of images in a landscape context. Part I reviews the major theories and interpretative perspectives put forward to understand the images, in historical perspective, and provides a critique discussing each of the main types of motifs occurring on the rocks. Part II outlines an innovative theoretical and methodological perspective for their study stressing sequence and relationality in bodily movement from rock to rock. Part III is a detailed case study and analysis of a series of rocks from northern Bohuslän in western Sweden. The conclusions reflect on the theoretical and methodological approach being taken in relation to the disciplinary practices involved in rock art research, and its future.

Looking at Pictures

Looking at Pictures PDF Author: Robert Walser
Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
ISBN: 9780811224246
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
A special side of Robert Walser: his essays on art

Seeing Through Maps

Seeing Through Maps PDF Author: Ward L. Kaiser
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 170

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Book Description
Synopsis: Maps become a means of seeing the world from many perspectives in this appealing guide, which is aimed at training readers to look at images with a critical eye. The authors (a social scientist and a pastor/community organizer) challenge readers to stretch their intellectual boundaries while they wrap their minds around demonstrations of the many ways of making maps and the truth that no way is "the right one." A final chapter provides a guide to using map projections in human resource development and adult education. It's a smart book but not a beautiful one-many of the illustrations went muddy in the transfer from color to b&w, and seven unlovely pages of the publisher's advertising precede the index. Wide format: 11x8.5.

Glittering Images

Glittering Images PDF Author: Camille Paglia
Publisher: Pantheon Books
ISBN: 0375424601
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
Presents a chronological tour of major themes in Western art as reflected by more than two dozen seminal images that use such mediums as paint, sculpture, architecture, performance art, and digital art.

Thinking Through Images

Thinking Through Images PDF Author: Christopher Tilley
Publisher: Oxbow Books
ISBN: 1789257042
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
This book provides a general self-reflexive review and critical analysis of Scandinavian rock art from the standpoint of Chris Tilley’s research in this area over the last thirty years. It offers a novel alternative theoretical perspective stressing the significance of visual narrative structure and rhythm, using musical analogies, putting particular emphasis on the embodied perception of images in a landscape context. Part I reviews the major theories and interpretative perspectives put forward to understand the images, in historical perspective, and provides a critique discussing each of the main types of motifs occurring on the rocks. Part II outlines an innovative theoretical and methodological perspective for their study stressing sequence and relationality in bodily movement from rock to rock. Part III is a detailed case study and analysis of a series of rocks from northern Bohuslän in western Sweden. The conclusions reflect on the theoretical and methodological approach being taken in relation to the disciplinary practices involved in rock art research, and its future.

The Photo Ark

The Photo Ark PDF Author: Joel Sartore
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 1426217773
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
This book of photography represents National Geographic's Photo Ark, a major cross-platform initiative and lifelong project by photographer Joel Sartore to make portraits of the world's animals -- especially those that are endangered. His message: to know these animals is to save them. Sartore intends to photograph every animal in captivity in the world. He is circling the globe, visiting zoos and wildlife rescue centers to create studio portraits of 12,000 species, with an emphasis on those facing extinction. He has photographed more than 6,000 already and now, thanks to a multi-year partnership with National Geographic, he may reach his goal. This book showcases his animal portraits: from tiny to mammoth, from the Florida grasshopper sparrow to the greater one-horned rhinoceros. Paired with the prose of veteran wildlife writer Douglas Chadwick, this book presents an argument for saving all the species of our planet.

Microcosmos

Microcosmos PDF Author: Brandon Broll
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781554077144
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This volume brings together images produced through the very latest techniques in microphotography. Most of the 203 full colour photographs have been taken using scanning electron microscopy (SEM), allowing us to see our world as never before. Each image is a close-up that reveals remarkable forms, shapes and colours.

Introducing Science through Images

Introducing Science through Images PDF Author: Maria E. Gigante
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 1611178754
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
An examination of how images can serve as communication tools to popularize science in the public eye As funding for basic scientific research becomes increasingly difficult to secure, public support becomes essential. Because of its promise for captivating nonexpert publics, the practice of merging art and imagery with science has been gaining traction in the scientific community. While images have been used with greater frequency in recent years, their value is often viewed as largely superficial. To the contrary, Maria E. Gigante posits in Introducing Science through Images, the value of imagery goes far beyond mere aesthetics—visual elements are powerful communication vehicles. The images examined in this volume, drawn from a wide range of historical periods, serve an introductory function—that is, they appear in a position of primacy relative to text and, like the introduction to a speech, have the potential to make audiences attentive and receptive to the forthcoming content. Gigante calls them "portal" images and explicates their utility in science communication, both to popularize and mystify science in the public eye. Gigante analyzes how science has been represented by various types of portal images: frontispieces, portraits of scientists, popular science magazine covers, and award-winning scientific images from Internet visualization competitions. Using theories of rhetoric and visual communication, she addresses the weak connection between scientific communities and the public and explores how visual elements can best be employed to garner public support for research.

Learning through Images in the Italian Renaissance

Learning through Images in the Italian Renaissance PDF Author: Federico Botana
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108853099
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 673

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Book Description
For the affluent merchant class of fifteenth-century Florence, the education of future generations was a fundamental matter. Together with texts, images played an important role in the development of the young into adult citizens. In this book, Federico Botana demonstrates how illustrated manuscripts of vernacular texts read by the Florentine youth facilitated understanding and memorisation of basic principles and knowledge. They were an important means of acquiring skills then considered necessary to gain the respect of others, to prosper as merchants, and to participate in civic life. Botana focuses on illustrated texts that were widely read in Quattrocento Florence: the Fior di virtù (a moral treatise including a bestiary), the Esopo volgarizzato (Aesop's Fables in Tuscan), the Sfera by Goro Dati (a poem on cosmology and geography), and mathematical manuals known as libri d'abbaco. He elucidates, in light of original sources and medieval and modern cognitive theory, the mechanisms that empowered illustrations to transmit knowledge in the Italian Renaissance.