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Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the 19th Century (October Books) | 
 enlarge | Author: Jonathan Crary
Publisher: The MIT Press
Category: Book
List Price: $22.00
Buy New: $13.63
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New (24) Used (17) from $11.99
Avg. Customer Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 34318
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 183
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 6.7 x 0.4
ISBN: 0262531070
Dewey Decimal Number: 701.15
EAN: 9780262531078
ASIN: 0262531070
Publication Date: February 25, 1992
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Product Description
Jonathan Crary's Techniques of the Observer provides a dramatically new perspective on the visual culture of the nineteenth century, reassessing problems of both visual modernism and social modernity. This analysis of the historical formation of the observer is a compelling account of the prehistory of the society of the spectacle."
Jonathan Crary is Assistant Professor of Art History at Columbia University. He is a founding editor of Zone and Zone Books.
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| Customer Reviews:
 A Camera Isn't a Camera March 30, 2005
16 out of 21 found this review helpful
HUGE thumbs up. Crary historicizes technological vision and illuminates an underrepresented point: things we're taught to think of as objective, such as cameras and vision, are in fact quite subjective and historical. They're ideas first, which means social/cultural ideas, from design to usage. Gradually these cultural ideas plus economic and technological possibility fuse into 'things'. The social aspects get invisibly embedded into these 'things' through myths of objectivity and modern people's desire to be taken care of by machines. When cultural values become things we are conditioned not to see the subjective part. Why? Our primary way of thinking is still the way of the Enlightenment -- from the 18th century -- which loves measuring and equating and separates 'myth' from 'science'. [Which is which? as Roger Waters asks, Do you think you can tell?] Western high culture privileges thinking and seeing over affect and body, imagining they are separate and valuing one over the other. Really it's just an excuse for laziness and cultural arrogance.
Read this book along with Eric Michaels' _Bad Aboriginal Art_ and Adorno and Horkheimer's _Dialectic of Enlightenment_ to begin to see glimpses of Western cultural values and narratives embedded in today's supposedly 'objective' media such as photography, video, TV, vision, etc. Do the work and eventually technology will be a mirror of your own social/historical context.
 Tricky but interesting September 2, 2003
11 out of 24 found this review helpful
Crary presents some interesting views on the perception of art. I found that it took a while for his ideas to formulate - the writing tends to be a bit wordy. I would recommend the book with reservations - really only for the serious academic reader. Not a casual bedside book.
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