Visions of Modernity

This overview of modern visual culture explores the relationship between technology, society and identity which underpins contemporary `media culture?. While tracing historical shifts as they have developed through, or intersected with, different camera technologies, the book is not so much about the camera?s field of vision: it is concerned with processes of modernization and the dramatic changes - perceptual, experiential, epistemological - which characterize modernity. Using the camera and its technologies as symbols of `realism?, Scott McQuire interweaves: the history of visual culture from Lumiere to virtual reality by way of photography, cinema and television; the broad social and political transformations of the last 150 years; the ambivalent relationship between `image? and `reality?; and the changing relationships of time and space, particularly related to colonialism, globalization, the modern city and cyberspace available in every home.