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From the Author
This is a meditation on vision. I am especially interested in the idea that seeing is automatic, and that the world is just there to be seen.It seems to me that seeing is very hard to understand: it is partly unconscious, and it is bound up with desire and fear. How, for example, do we see faces? Do we look at a face in the same way as we touch it, moving up and down, following its contours? If the face is frightening, do we look at it in a way that is different from touching? The book brings a number of disciplines to bear on these kinds of questions, including art history, neurobiology, cognitive pscyhology, experiments on animal vision and machine vision, and psychoanalysis. I have taken examples freely from different fields, including medical illustration, fine art, manuals of cosmetics, medieval icons, paleontology, microscopy, physical chemistry, travel illustration, mathematics. The purpose is to ask questions about vision, and to show how little we know about how we see.
WHAT is the simplest-the absolute minimum-that can be said about seeing? Read the first page
Concordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
LESS because we are so often "blind" or unaware of what we see and the very NATURE of what we see and how we see at all. MORE, because so much rests on our ability to see AT ALL, especially in the late 20th century, and especially in our culture, which places such high value on sight (though, perhaps, less value on HOW we see or WHAT is seen). But, again, LESS, because we really don't THINK about what we see or *how* we see...
Mr. Elkins, an art historian-- someone TRAINED to see, if you will-- has done much thinking on the topic and theory of sight and what it REALLY means to see. I admit, when I first got this book, I was afraid it would be the sort of dry, academic drivel that one would need to plow through with a dictionary at one's side, coming to the end almost gasping for breath, "there!! <pant, pant> I finished it!!"
Not so at all. Mr. Elkins has written an extremely entertaining, thought provoking book on something we all do every day, often for every SECOND of the day (and isn't dreaming a form of seeing, after all, in it's own fashion??), and done it without heavy emphasis on academia, abstract or unknown concepts, or the general feeling-- that I have had in other arenas-- that he clearly wishes us to believe that he is SMARTER than the average reader, and needs to prove it through the use of highly technical jargon or impenetrable metaphor.
Again, I say, "not at all." This is a very engaging, thought provoking work that I would heartily recommend to anyone even REMOTELY interested in the ideas behind sight and what is (and is NOT) seen. We do it all the time, every day, from birth to death, in most cases. The least we can do is to listen to a fine thinker like Mr. Elkins and hear HIS thoughts on this complicated, fascinating subject.
While I felt moved by the book, quite powerfully at places, I'm not sure that I actually went anywhere. Elkins avoids all mechanistic discussion of vision--even though there is much in the physiology of seeing and the quantum physics of observation which support his thesis. Consequently, the overall discussion lacks a certain fiber even though it's fully persuasive in parts. Still, if you care about vision and imagery, you can't go wrong by reading this eloquent, passionate book. It's guaranteed to make you think before you look.
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