Pamela H. Smith: The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (2004)

“Since the time of Aristotle, the making of knowledge and the making of objects have generally been considered separate enterprises. Yet during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the two became linked through a “new” philosophy known as science. In The Body of the Artisan, Pamela H. Smith demonstrates how much early modern science owed to an unlikely source-artists and artisans.

From goldsmiths to locksmiths and from carpenters to painters, artists and artisans were much sought after by the new scientists for their intimate, hands-on knowledge of natural materials and the ability to manipulate them. Drawing on a fascinating array of new evidence from northern Europe including artisans’ objects and their writings, Smith shows how artisans saw all knowledge as rooted in matter and nature. With nearly two hundred images, The Body of the Artisan provides astonishingly vivid examples of this Renaissance synergy among art, craft, and science, and recovers a forgotten episode of the Scientific Revolution-an episode that forever altered the way we see the natural world.”

Publisher University of Chicago Press, 2004
ISBN 0226763994, 9780226763996
x+367 pages

Reviews: Ashley D. West (CAA Reviews, 2004), Marjorie Harth (Pomona, 2004), Eileen Reeves (Renaissance Quarterly, 2005), William Eamon (Isis, 2006), John Henry (British Journal for the History of Science, 2006), Jonathan Sheehan (American Historical Review, 2006), Klaas van Berkel (BMGN, 2006), Trevor Marchand (Senses and Society Journal, 2008).

Publisher

PDF (51 MB, updated on 2020-5-1)

Jonathan Crary: Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (1990–) [EN, HU, TR, ES, BR-PT, CN]

“In Techniques of the Observer Jonathan Crary provides a dramatically new perspective on the visual culture of the nineteenth century, reassessing problems of both visual modernism and social modernity.

Inverting conventional approaches, Crary considers the problem of visuality not through the study of art works and images, but by analyzing the historical construction of the observer. He insists that the problems of vision are inseparable from the operation of social power and examines how, beginning in the 1820s, the observer became the site of new discourses and practices that situated vision within the body as a physiological event. Alongside the sudden appearance of physiological optics, Crary points out, theories and models of “subjective vision” were developed that gave the observer a new autonomy and productivity while simultaneously allowing new forms of control and standardization of vision.

Crary examines a range of diverse work in philosophy, in the empirical sciences, and in the elements of an emerging mass visual culture. He discusses at length the significance of optical apparatuses such as the stereoscope and of precinematic devices, detailing how they were the product of new physiological knowledge. He also shows how these forms of mass culture, usually labeled as “realist,” were in fact based on abstract models of vision, and he suggests that mimetic or perspectival notions of vision and representation were initially abandoned in the first half of the nineteenth century within a variety of powerful institutions and discourses, well before the modernist painting of the 1870s and 1880s.”

Publisher MIT Press, Dec 1990
October Books series
ISBN 0262031698
171 pages

Publisher (EN)

Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (English, 1990, 21 MB, updated on 2015-2-18)
A megfigyelő módszerei. Látás és modernitás a 19. században (Hungarian, trans. Ágnes Lukács, 1999, no OCR)
Gözlemcinin Teknikleri. On Dokuzuncu Yüzyılda Görme ve Modernite (Turkish, trans. Elif Daldeniz, 2002/2004, added on 2024-3-3)
Las técnicas del observador: visión y modernidad en el siglo XIX (Spanish, trans. Fernando López García, 2008)
Técnicas do observador: visão e modernidade no século XIX (BR-Portuguese, trans. Verrah Chamma, 2012, added on 2024-3-3)
Guan cha zhe de ji shu / 观察者的技术 (Chinese, 2017, added on 2024-3-3)

Man Ray: Self Portrait (1963)

In this remarkable autobiography, Man Ray – painter, photographer, sculptor, film maker and writer – relates the story of his life, from his childhood determination to be an artist and his technical drawing classes in a Brooklyn high school, to the glamorous and heady days of Paris in the 1940s, when any trip to the city ‘was not complete until they had been “done” by Man Ray’s camera’.

Friend to everyone who was anyone, Ray tells everything he knows of artists, socialites and writers such as Matisse, Hemingway, Picasso and Joyce, not to mention Lee Miller, Nancy Cunard, Alberto Giacometti, Gertrude Stein, Dali, Max Ernst and many more, in this decadent account of the early twentieth-century cultural world.

Publisher Little, Brown and Company, Boston and Toronto, 1963
402 pages

PDF (58 MB, no OCR)