Far from the bridges and cable cars, hidden away behind the famous hills, there is another San Francisco Bay Area that most people never see. San Francisco's Hunter's Point and Fillmore District, West Oakland and Richmond's Iron Triangle -- in the 1970s these places on the edges of this great American metropolis offered Barry Shapiro an alternate reality where he pointed his lens. Although Barry made his reputation as a professional photographer with the 1972 publication of Handmade Houses: The Woodbutcher's Art, his day job as a teacher of remedial reading to adults gave him an entree into a world that white America only saw in the blaxploitation films of the day like "Shaft" and "Superfly." His curious eye brought him to many dangerous places, but with the trust he earned, he was able to not only hang out in this unique subculture, but be allowed to photograph their very intimate and sometimes dark moments. In these photos we see glimpses of tenderness that can explode into violence, tension that dissolves into laughter, kids showing off for the camera, and tough motorcycle gangs chilled out after a night of hard partying. What instantly captures the viewer's attention is that Barry, with the force of his energetic personality, established a trusting relationship with each of his subjects, whether that relationship lasted for years or only a few seconds. When Barry wasn't hanging out in these fringe neighborhoods, he was prowling the streets of the Bay Area with his stealth Leica shooting poignant black-and-white moments of street life through the windows of his VW bus. These images record an incredible slice of everyday urban life without any hint of his even being there. Barry captured what Henri Cartier-Bresson called "the decisive moment" over and over with a natural ability that only the best photographers have. Always a maverick, rarely inclined to shoot to spec and unwilling to compromise or cater to photographic fashion, Barry shot his black-and-white photographs with no thoughts of commercialism. Although his career as a photographer spanned more than forty years, and he spent the last sixteen years of his life as a high-school teacher and principal, he never stopped shooting. With a foreword by famed San Francisco rock photographer Jim Marshall and an introduction by best-selling novelist Mark Joseph, two of Barry's closest friends, A Dangerously Curious Eye will show you a very different side of the San Francisco Bay Area.

The Curious Eye explores early modern debates over two related questions: what are the limits of human vision, and to what extent can these limits be overcome by technological enhancement? In our everyday lives, we rely on optical technology to provide us with information about visually remote spaces even as we question the efficacy and ethics of such pursuits. But the debates surrounding the subject of technologically mediated vision have their roots in a much older literary tradition in which the ability to see beyond the limits of natural human vision is associated with philosophical and spiritual insight as well as social and political control. The Curious Eye provides insight into the subject of optically-mediated vision by returning to the literature of the seventeenth century, the historical moment in which human visual capacity in the West was first extended through the application of optical technologies to the eye. Bringing imaginative literary works by Francis Bacon, John Milton, Margaret Cavendish, and Aphra Behn together with optical and philosophical treatises by Johannes Kepler, Rene Descartes, Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle, and Isaac Newton, the volume explores the social and intellectual impact of the new optical technologies of the seventeenth century on its literature. At the same time, it demonstrates that social, political, and literary concerns are not peripheral to the optical science of the period but, rather, an integral part of it, the legacy of which we continue to experience.

With enemies on all sides, who can Drake really trust? On the run after escaping from what was supposed to be the world's most secure juvenile facility (and blowing it up in the process), Will Drake knows it's only a matter of time before the sinister Alliance catches up with him. But Drake is in need of an alliance of his own - knowing who to trust is becoming increasingly difficult, and after having been exposed to the highly unstable (and potentially deadly) Crystal-X whilst fleeing from the Rig, it looks like time might be running out for him all together. His arm has started to mutate into an impenetrable black crystal, and although it gives him a superhuman-like ability to fight, it might also be causing him to lose his mind. Surrounded by enemies and desperate for help, Drake and his escapee comrades are forced to form an uneasy partnership with a mysterious group who also claim to have been exposed to Crystal-X. They say they know how to use its powers for good - but can Drake really keep running forever? And who should he trust more - his supposed friends, or the voices in his head...?

Long considered "the noblest of the senses," vision has increasingly come under critical scrutiny by a wide range of thinkers who question its dominance in Western culture. These critics of vision, especially prominent in twentieth-century France, have challenged its allegedly superior capacity to provide access to the world. They have also criticized its supposed complicity with political and social oppression through the promulgation of spectacle and surveillance. Martin Jay turns to this discourse surrounding vision and explores its often contradictory implications in the work of such influential figures as Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, Guy Debord, Luce Irigaray, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida. Jay begins with a discussion of the theory of vision from Plato to Descartes, then considers its role in the French Enlightenment before turning to its status in the culture of modernity. From consideration of French Impressionism to analysis of Georges Bataille and the Surrealists, Roland Barthes's writings on photography, and the film theory of Christian Metz, Jay provides lucid and fair-minded accounts of thinkers and ideas widely known for their difficulty. His book examines the myriad links between the interrogation of vision and the pervasive antihumanist, antimodernist, and counter-enlightenment tenor of much recent French thought. Refusing, however, to defend the dominant visual order, he calls instead for a plurality of "scopic regimes." Certain to generate controversy and discussion throughout the humanities and social sciences, Downcast Eyes will consolidate Jay's reputation as one of today's premier cultural and intellectual historians.