Michael Lesy Ph.D.
Autor(a) de Looking Backward: A Photographic Portrait of the World at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century
Obras por Michael Lesy Ph.D.
Etiquetado
Conhecimento Comum
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Membros
Críticas
Estatísticas
- Obras
- 2
- Membros
- 23
- Popularidade
- #537,598
- Avaliação
- 4.3
- Críticas
- 1
- ISBN
- 1
The photographs were originally stereographs: fully three-dimensional images intended to be viewed with a special device. This was big business for a while, and it's worthwhile to reflect how much power these images must have had to people who, in contrast to we moderns, were not exposed to thousands of images every day on screens, but only the few presented to them on commercial signs, in newspapers and magazines, in uncommonly encountered illustrated books, and perhaps at movie theaters a few times a month. A 3-D image must have often produced gasps, even when they did not show decaying bodies with missing limbs or the neck stumps of beheaded prisoners, as some of these do.
To my history-nerd sensibilities, the book's greatest strength lies in the text, not the images. At the beginning, and especially between chapters, Lesy explains the origin of the stereograph and how for a few decades it was the biggest media sensation of its era. It's a forgotten history magnificently explained, mixed together with Lesy's own meditations on history and progress and the contrast between the past and the present moment. Lesy is as excellent a writer as he is an archivist, and although the project would be uncommercial, I wish he'd written a book about the stereograph instead of this shock-and-awe image collection.… (mais)