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 t