The Engine of Visualization: Thinking through Photography - Softcover

Maynard, Patrick

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0801486890 ISBN 13: 9780801486890

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 2000

Synopsis

"An extremely fascinating study, packed with insights and illumination and astute observation. It is first-rate philosophy―clearheaded, imaginative, sophisticated, and resourceful. And in its historical and technological dimensions, it connects with the 'real world' in ways that are rare in philosophical studies."―Kendall Walton, University of Michigan"For Patrick Maynard photography is in the first instance a technology for marking surfaces, and from this insight flows the most original sustained analysis and argument yet produced in the history of thinking about the camera and its work. At once analytical and historical, scientific and aesthetic, as lucid and witty as it is learned, The Engine of Visualization spells out the simplest general principles necessary for a clear understanding of what photography―also technology, image, and art―is and does. This is a signal achievement, and a simply lovely book."―Alan Trachtenberg, Yale UniversityIn the first philosophical book wholly about photography, Patrick Maynard dispels some basic, persistent confusions by treating photography as a technology―a way to enhance and filter human power. Once photography is understood as a kind of technology, Maynard argues, insights about technology may be applied to provide the general perspective on photography that has been missing.

About this title

Synopsis:

The author draws upon written source material from the time of photography's invention to look deeply at some of the practitioners' intentions and the way they framed their own thoughts. Drawing on contemporary criticism of the medium in the latter part of the book, the author proposes that the thinking that photographic practice has engendered is perhaps more representative of our imaginings that the images themselves. The study makes a contribution to the ongoing conversation about photography by calling attention to the unexpected forms into which the "technology" of photography has been evolving. Patrick Maynard's examination of photography as a productive process, "an engine of visualization" challenges studies in which the category "photography" is evaluated in terms of photographs, which are, in turn, evaluated in relation to the things to which they refer.

About the Author:

Patrick Maynard is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Western Ontario. He is the author of The Engine of Visualization: Thinking through Photography, also from Cornell.

About this edition

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0801486890
• ISBN 13: 9780801486890
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352