Through the lens

The lens is a defining technology of the current era. Images from microscopes, cameras, telescopes, video and film cameras make up what A. D. Coleman calls lens culture (Coleman 1998). Lenses predated photography, but continue to mold vision in ways that are often unnoticed and unacknowledged: “as an instrument of visual communication, the lens is unique in that, for all practical purposes, it is literally as well as metaphorically invisible” (Coleman 1998: 114). Lenses are not seen, but seen through. Technological lens development was fueled by the assumption that the visual domain was potentially unlimited – that with proper lenses, humans can make everything visible. Given the lens’s clear influence on visual communication, it is important that “we come to understand the extent to which lenses shape, filter, and otherwise alter the data that passes through them – the extreme degree to which the lens itself informs our information” (Coleman 1998: 129). The most ubiquitous lens is found on cameras – from cheap disposable models to exorbitant, sophisticated digital motion picture imaging systems.