ABSTRACT
I wrote that well over a decade ago, but the project from which my talk tonight is drawn connects at least in part to its content. When I wrote Techniques of the Observer, I had made the polemical decision to discuss the modernization of vision in the nineteenth century without artworks or images as primary pieces of evidence. Now, however, I’m addressing some related questions about the historical status of perception but with artworks very much as central objects of interrogation. And most of my talk is an examination of several paintings, each of which diagrams an exemplary and problematic relation between spectator and image.
