Download or read book The Secrets of the Camera Obscura written by David Knowles and published by Chronicle Books (CA). This book was released on 1994 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When an Italian woman is decapitated, a photographer/storyteller who lives in a camera obscura decides to solve her murder

Download or read book Secret Knowledge written by David Hockney and published by . This book was released on 2009-05 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Vermeer s Camera written by Philip Steadman and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Art historians have long speculated on how Vermeer achieved the uncanny mixture of detached precision, compositional repose, and perspective accuracy that have drawn many to describe his work as "photographic." Indeed, many wonder if Vermeer employed a camera obscura, a primitive form of camera, to enhance his realistic effects? In Vermeer's Camera, Philip Steadman traces the development of the camera obscura--first described by Leonaro da Vinci--weighs the arguments that scholars have made for and against Vermeer's use of the camera, and offers a fascinating examination of the paintings themselves and what they alone can tell us of Vermeer's technique. Vermeer left no record of his method and indeed we know almost nothing of the man nor of how he worked. But by a close and illuminating study of the paintings Steadman concludes that Vermeer did use the camera obscura and shows how the inherent defects in this primitive device enabled Vermeer to achieve some remarkable effects--the slight blurring of image, the absence of sharp lines, the peculiar illusion not of closeness but of distance in the domestic scenes. Steadman argues that the use of the camera also explains some previously unexplainable qualities of Vermeer's art, such as the absence of conventional drawing, the pattern of underpainting in areas of pure tone, the pervasive feeling of reticence that suffuses his canvases, and the almost magical sense that Vermeer is painting not objects but light itself. Drawing on a wealth of Vermeer research and displaying an extraordinary sensitivity to the subtleties of the work itself, Philip Steadman offers in Vermeer's Camera a fresh perspective on some of the most enchanting paintings ever created.

Download or read book Traces of Vermeer written by Jane Jelley and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-07-14 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Johannes Vermeer's luminous paintings are loved and admired around the world, yet we do not understand how they were made. We see sunlit spaces; the glimmer of satin, silver, and linen; we see the softness of a hand on a lute string or letter. We recognise the distilled impression of a moment of time; and we feel it to be real. We might hope for some answers from the experts, but they are confounded too. Even with the modern technology available, they do not know why there is no evidence of any preliminary drawing; why there are shifts in focus; and why his pictures are unusually blurred. Some wonder if he might possibly have used a camera obscura to capture what he saw before him. The few traces Vermeer has left behind tell us little: there are no letters or diaries; and no reports of him at work. Jane Jelley has taken a new path in this detective story. A painter herself, she has worked with the materials of his time: the cochineal insect and lapis lazuli; the sheep bones, soot, earth, and rust. She shows us how painters made their pictures layer by layer; she investigates old secrets; and hears travellers' tales. She explores how Vermeer could have used a lens in the creation of his masterpieces. The clues were there all along. After all this time, now we can unlock the studio door, and catch a glimpse of Vermeer inside, painting light.

Download or read book Measuring Shadows written by Raz Chen-Morris and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2016-03-31 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Measuring Shadows, Raz Chen-Morris demonstrates that a close study of Kepler’s Optics is essential to understanding his astronomical work and his scientific epistemology. He explores Kepler’s radical break from scientific and epistemological traditions and shows how the seventeenth-century astronomer posited new ways to view scientific truth and knowledge. Chen-Morris reveals how Kepler’s ideas about the formation of images on the retina and the geometrics of the camera obscura, as well as his astronomical observations, advanced the argument that physical reality could only be described through artificially produced shadows, reflections, and refractions. Breaking from medieval and Renaissance traditions that insisted upon direct sensory perception, Kepler advocated for instruments as mediators between the eye and physical reality, and for mathematical language to describe motion. It was only through this kind of knowledge, he argued, that observation could produce certainty about the heavens. Not only was this conception of visibility crucial to advancing the early modern understanding of vision and the retina, but it affected how people during that period approached and understood the world around them.

Download or read book Becoming written by Carol Mavor and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A writerly study of Lady Hawarden's photographs and other visual representations of the complex erotics of adolescent girlhood.

Download or read book The Secrets of Winterhouse written by Ben Guterson and published by Henry Holt and Company (BYR). This book was released on 2018-12-31 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bookish puzzles, phantom mysteries, and evil curses await as Elizabeth returns to Winterhouse in Book 2 of this magical series. Back at the Winterhouse hotel for another holiday season, Elizabeth and Freddy dig deeper into the mystery surrounding Riley S. Granger, a hotel guest who left behind odd artifacts—one being a magical book that the evil Gracella Winters once attempted to use to gain destructive power over the entire Falls lineage. The two friends follow a trail of clues, inadvertently attracting the attention of a suspicious new hotel guest: Elana Vesper. The clock is ticking as Elizabeth and Freddy struggle to figure out whether Elana is merely a pawn or a player in the plot to revive the spirit of Gracella. If that wasn’t enough, Elizabeth suspects she is coming into her own special powers—and she’s fearful it might lead her right into Gracella’s vicious web. Mystery, adventure, and a winning friendship combine in this much anticipated sequel. Christy Ottaviano Books

Download or read book Locust Gleanings written by W. C. Bamberger and published by Wildside Press LLC. This book was released on 2010-06-01 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new collection of literary essays includes pieces on the fiction of Joe Brainard, Guy Davenport, Alice Hoffman, Kenneth Koch, Ann Lauterbach, Ishmael Reed, and Samuel R. Delany, among many others. Bamberger also adds an unpublished diary of his 2007 trip to Manhattan, Long Island, and Philadephia, detailing the many literary and artistic figures he met along the way. Another remarkable journey by a major modern critic.

Download or read book The Secrets of Winterhouse written by Ben Guterson and published by Henry Holt and Company (BYR). This book was released on 2018-12-31 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bookish puzzles, phantom mysteries, and evil curses await as Elizabeth returns to Winterhouse in Book 2 of this magical series. Back at the Winterhouse hotel for another holiday season, Elizabeth and Freddy dig deeper into the mystery surrounding Riley S. Granger, a hotel guest who left behind odd artifacts—one being a magical book that the evil Gracella Winters once attempted to use to gain destructive power over the entire Falls lineage. The two friends follow a trail of clues, inadvertently attracting the attention of a suspicious new hotel guest: Elana Vesper. The clock is ticking as Elizabeth and Freddy struggle to figure out whether Elana is merely a pawn or a player in the plot to revive the spirit of Gracella. If that wasn’t enough, Elizabeth suspects she is coming into her own special powers—and she’s fearful it might lead her right into Gracella’s vicious web. Mystery, adventure, and a winning friendship combine in this much anticipated sequel. Christy Ottaviano Books

Download or read book Camera Obscura Camera Lucida written by Richard Allen and published by Peterson's. This book was released on 2003 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Annette Michelson's contributions to art and film criticism over the last three decades have been unparalleled. This volume honors her unique legacy with original essays by some of the many scholars who have been influenced by her work. Some continue her efforts to develop theoretical frameworks for understanding modernist art, while others practice her form of interdisciplinary criticism in relation to avant-garde and modernist art works and artists. Still others investigate and evaluate Michelson's work itself. All in some way pay homage to her extraordinary contribution.

Download or read book The Pencil of Nature written by William Henry Fox Talbot and published by DigiCat. This book was released on 2022-09-16 with total page 66 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "The Pencil of Nature" by William Henry Fox Talbot. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

Download or read book Eye of the Beholder Johannes Vermeer Antoni van Leeuwenhoek and the Reinvention of Seeing written by Laura J. Snyder and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2015-03-16 with total page 563 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The remarkable story of how an artist and a scientist in seventeenth-century Holland transformed the way we see the world. On a summer day in 1674, in the small Dutch city of Delft, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek—a cloth salesman, local bureaucrat, and self-taught natural philosopher—gazed through a tiny lens set into a brass holder and discovered a never-before imagined world of microscopic life. At the same time, in a nearby attic, the painter Johannes Vermeer was using another optical device, a camera obscura, to experiment with light and create the most luminous pictures ever beheld. “See for yourself!” was the clarion call of the 1600s. Scientists peered at nature through microscopes and telescopes, making the discoveries in astronomy, physics, chemistry, and anatomy that ignited the Scientific Revolution. Artists investigated nature with lenses, mirrors, and camera obscuras, creating extraordinarily detailed paintings of flowers and insects, and scenes filled with realistic effects of light, shadow, and color. By extending the reach of sight the new optical instruments prompted the realization that there is more than meets the eye. But they also raised questions about how we see and what it means to see. In answering these questions, scientists and artists in Delft changed how we perceive the world. In Eye of the Beholder, Laura J. Snyder transports us to the streets, inns, and guildhalls of seventeenth-century Holland, where artists and scientists gathered, and to their studios and laboratories, where they mixed paints and prepared canvases, ground and polished lenses, examined and dissected insects and other animals, and invented the modern notion of seeing. With charm and narrative flair Snyder brings Vermeer and Van Leeuwenhoek—and the men and women around them—vividly to life. The story of these two geniuses and the transformation they engendered shows us why we see the world—and our place within it—as we do today. Eye of the Beholder was named "A Best Art Book of the Year" by Christie's and "A Best Read of the Year" by New Scientist in 2015.

Download or read book On Alberti and the Art of Building written by Robert Tavernor and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1998-01-01 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leon Battista Alberti (1404-72) - writer, painter and sculptor, mathematician and, most famously, architectural theorist and architect - came closer than anyone to the Renaissance ideal of the 'complete man'. Recognised by his contemporaries as an extraordinary person, he helped to shape, through his writings and his practical example in the arts, the way in which the natural and artificial world was perceived and represented during the Renaissance.

Download or read book A Manual of Photography written by Robert Hunt and published by . This book was released on 1854 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Scenes of Projection written by Jill H. Casid and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2015-01-01 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theorizing vision and power at the intersections of the histories of psychoanalysis, media, scientific method, and colonization, Scenes of Projection poaches the prized instruments at the heart of the so-called scientific revolution: the projecting telescope, camera obscura, magic lantern, solar microscope, and prism. From the beginnings of what is retrospectively enshrined as the origins of the Enlightenment and in the wake of colonization, the scene of projection has functioned as a contraption for creating a fantasy subject of discarnate vision for the exercise of “reason.” Jill H. Casid demonstrates across a range of sites that the scene of projection is neither a static diagram of power nor a fixed architecture but rather a pedagogical setup that operates as an influencing machine of persistent training. Thinking with queer and feminist art projects that take up old devices for casting an image to reorient this apparatus of power that produces its subject, Scenes of Projection offers a set of theses on the possibilities for felt embodiment out of the damaged and difficult pasts that haunt our present.

Download or read book Marshall McLuhan written by Janine Marchessault and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2005 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why is McLuhan important? What use can we make of his approach to the media today? In this insightful critical introduction, McLuhan's contribution is carefully explained and his reputation reassessed. The book: explains McLuhan's key ideas; engages with critical issues in media and contemporary art; demonstrates the relevance of his work for students of media and communications; addresses his methodological contribution; revises our understanding of his place in the history of ideas.

Download or read book Tractatus de perspectiva written by John Peckham and published by . This book was released on 1972 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: