The Story of Looking by Mark Cousins

Author:Mark Cousins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Canongate Books

Like Cameron’s photograph, Bradley’s shows how well this new technology works in tandem with something else – here a sentence of information about the subject’s previous deafness. The photograph’s relationship with the words is desirous. Each does something the other cannot. An image wants to be words, and words – as we will see in the next chapter – are often desperate to be images. Miscegenated, they are the looking dream team. They make Harold Whittles’s face unforgettable.

They do so, in part, because of time. Russian Futurist Natalia Goncharova’s painting The Cyclist (page 46) tried to show movement through time by repeating the image of a bicycle’s wheels and the cyclist’s body as if they were visual echoes. In this chronophotograph by Étienne-Jules Marey, eight photographs prove Goncharova’s hunch, so to speak. Her painting gave an impression of a movement that was too fast for the shutterless human eye to isolate into a series of still images. Marey, Eadweard Muybridge and other pioneers used a series of photographs taken in quick succession to capture individual stages of a kinetic event. The poetics of dance, the physiology of a cantering horse, the kinesiology (study of muscle movement) of a tennis player: the process of all of these could now be seen. Chronophotography was like infrared imaging. It allowed us to see beyond what is visible with the naked eye.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.