How did faulty or failing eyesight affect the style and technique of writers and artists. How did it affect the way they convey their visual impressions. In a classic study, first published in 1970 and thoroughly revised in 1988, Patrick Trevor-Roper combines his professional knowledge of ophthalmology with his extensive familiarity with art and literature to fascinatingly examine the work of painters, sculptors, poets and prose writers. Looking at the effects of myopia, cataracts, colour blindness, squints and total blindness he speculates on what the impact would have been on artists had they worn glasses. Illustrated with colour reproductions and a wealth of black and white photos, this was a true labour of love from a highly cultured man, erudite and stimulating.

How did faulty or failing eyesight affect the style and technique of writers and artists. How did it affect the way they convey their visual impressions. In a classic study, first published in 1970 and thoroughly revised in 1988, Patrick Trevor-Roper combines his professional knowledge of ophthalmology with his extensive familiarity with art and literature to fascinatingly examine the work of painters, sculptors, poets and prose writers. Looking at the effects of myopia, cataracts, colour blindness, squints and total blindness he speculates on what the impact would have been on artists had they worn glasses. Illustrated with colour reproductions and a wealth of black and white photos, this was a true labour of love from a highly cultured man, erudite and stimulating.

"On Blinking" opens a dossier on seeing. It looks not only to the epistemological sense of what it means to see or the hermeneutical sense of what is the meaning of that which is seen but attends to various sites of knowledge-photography, literature, and philosophy. And in doing so, it questions the privileging of presence and sight in Western thought. Thus, this book, through the essays- "Emerging Sight, Emerging Blindness" (Brian Willems); "Augen, Blicke, Stätten" (Julia Hölzl); "At the risk of love" (Jeremy Fernando); and "Suspended in a Moving Night: Photography, or the Shiny Relation Self-World" (Jessica Aliaga Lavrijsen)- attempts to address the question what is seeing.

In this book a leading researcher and artist explores how we see pictures and how they can communicate messages to us, both directly and indirectly by making allusions to objects in space or to stored images in our minds. Originally published in 1990, Dr Wade provides fascinating examples of pictures that communicate hidden messages, either by implying something else, or by a shape or portrait which is carried covertly within another design. He analyses image processing stages in vision, demonstrating that the various stages may be related to styles in representational art. He shows how the way we have been taught to look at and recognise objects, affects the way we see them. The book lavishly illustrates with original examples of visual allusions and includes detailed practical advice on how photographers and designers can create them. Essential reading for photographers, designers, artists, people in film and television, and anyone involved in visual science , visual communication and advertising.

Now available in English for the first time, The Visibility of the Image explores the development of an influential aesthetic tradition through the work of six figures. Analysing their contribution to the progress of formal aesthetics, from its origins in Germany in the 1880s to semiotic interpretations in America a century later, the six chapters cover: Robert Zimmermann (1824-1898), the first to separate aesthetics and metaphysics and approach aesthetics along the lines of formal logic, providing a purely syntactic way of using signs, regardless of objective content; Alois Riegl (1858-1905), who went on to further develop aesthetics on the model of formal logic, creating a theory of style in response to Zimmermann's call for an aesthetics oriented toward formal logic; Heinrich Wölfflin (1864-1945), who represents a step toward an understanding of consciousness by using pictures as cognitive tools; Konrad Fiedler (1841-1895), the Saxon philosopher who considered the possibility that some kinds of images are made and viewed not for what they show, but for their visibility's sake alone; Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961), responsible for taking up the connections between the problems of reducing the range of potential meanings and contexts of a given image down to just the picture surface; Charles William Morris (1901-1979), who set out to establish whether a picture with no objective reference, such as an abstract painting, still counts as a sign, and if so, in what sense. Bringing these thinkers together and interlinking their ideas, Lambert Wiesing presents an engaging history of formal aesthetics, while reconstructing the philosophical foundations for the appearance of new image forms in the 20th century, including the video-clip, abstract collage, digital simulation and virtual reality. Using this original approach, The Visibility of the Image introduces the rise of modern image theory and provides a valuable account of our engagement with pictures in the 21st century.