Wild rails and nervous nystagmus
*The research for this blog post contributed to a paper The Liminal Wilderness of Railway Margins that I delivered on June 27 2013 at Cultures of the Suburbs. The ‘Cultures of the Suburbs International Research […]
Category Archives: Visuality
Put most simply: “Seeing is Believing”. Coined by the Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle in his lectures On Heroes (1841), the term has been adopted by modernist and post-modernist commentators on the primacy we give to seeing.
A secret is out!
Re- photography is hot. The change in the medium to digital has made accessing archives of film and paper seem more urgent or attractive. I have posted before about Mark […]
Silver Eyes: see for yourself!
Consider a claret glass; a transparent container whose spherical surfaces clumsily distort what we see through them. Fill it with water and instantly it becomes a lens in which we […]
…and through father’s eye
(James) Brian McArdle has come up incidentally in some recent email exchanges with a public gallery director/photography historian, interested in my father’s work because Brian was editor of Walkabout magazine through […]
In another’s head
What is it like to look through another’s eyes? There’s current interest in the photography of Mark Strizic (see past post) as a documenter of 1960s Melbourne. Fifty years ago […]
From the corner of your eye?…
Here’s an interactive exercise to try. Take a look at the diagram. You will recognise that it is a checkerboard pattern with severe pincushion distortion, like the lens test result […]
Evanescent
Featherlight is from a new series I will show during the upcoming (this Friday) Castlemaine State Festival 15-24 March 2013. These renew my childhood delight and fascination with the projected image. For […]
Nude Ascendant
February 15, 2013 was the 100th anniversary of the opening of the revolutionary 1913 Armory Show arts fair which brought Modern art to New York. Francis Naumann Fine Art marks […]
Everything?
The advent of photography and how our burgeoning, and now ubiquitous, use of the medium has changed, well, everything, is the theme of essays in Photography Changes Everything recently published by the Smithsonian Institute. […]
Suffer Breitz’ children
Robert Nelson in his comprehensive February 13 review of Candice Breitz’ exhibition The Character at ACMI, Federation Square, Melbourne (until March 11) is fairly well disposed to what might be quite […]
Another First Photo
It’s probably rare for children these days not to have made a photograph, or a great many of them if they have access to a phone camera, before the […]
Call for artists: self-portraits and death, mortality, identity and the self.
PhD candidate Rebecca Louise at Deakin University issues this Call Out: Photographers are invited to apply to be included in an upcoming photographic exhibition, TRACES to be held in Melbourne. Inspired by […]
Perspective blown up
Jeff Wall‘s display lightboxes contain some weird perspective. The celebrated Canadian is showing at NGV at Melbourne’s Fed Square (till March 17, 2013). I regret was not well enough to attend the […]
X-Ray Vision, or Concentration?
Mark Changizi has been producing papers since 2008 around a theory of the function of human binocular vision. It is expressed in his The Vision Revolution in an engaging Chapter […]
Perceptual photography
This blog promotes perceptual or ‘optical’ photography as a parallel stream to ‘subject-based’ photography. There is continuous, if often submerged, history behind this stream, dating back to Julia Margaret Cameron’s […]
Mark Strizic Biography
Mark Strizic, who recently died (08.12.2012), migrated from Croatia in 1950 and became a widely published architectural and industrial photographer, portraitist of significant Australians. He taught photography at tertiary level in Melbourne from […]
Fly’s-Eye View
FlyVIZ, is described in a 2012 paper by ESIEA – INSA group (consisting Jérôme Ardouin, Anatole Lécuyer, Maud Marchal, Clément Riant, Eric Marchand) as ‘A Novel Display Device to Provide Humans with 360° […]
Positive, negative and ‘screen’ image…manifested in the Renaissance
I just read Amy R Bloch‘s essay ‘Donatello’s Chellini Madonna, light and vision’ in Renaissance Theories of Vision. Not being a Renaissance scholar I was attracted to this title Renaissance […]
We may one day see in infra-red – New Scientist
Marco Garavelli at the University of Bologna in Italy says that in the far future, “one could dare to foresee mutations in visual receptors that extend our ability to see […]
Introduction
How do we see? How do we ‘pay attention’ visually? Why do we have two eyes? What is camera vision? Here you will discover, and be invited to participate in, […]
James McArdle: Camera/Eye 