The follow-up to the seminal Ways of Seeing, one of the most influential books on art

Examines the themes of presence and absence, the relationship between photography and theatre, history and death. This title offers an investigation into the nature of photographs.

Long considered 'the noblest of the senses', vision has increasingly come under critical scrutiny by a wide range of thinkers who question its dominance in Western culture. This work discusses the theory of vision from Plato to Descartes, and considers its role in the French Enlightenment before turning to its status in the culture of modernity.

Crary aims to provide a different perspective on the visual culture of the 19th century, reassessing problems of both visual modernism and social modernity. This is an analysis of the historical formation of the observer and an account of the prehistory of the society of the spectacle .

Offering a theory of new media, this book places the recent developments within the history of visual culture of the last few centuries. The reliance on old conventions as well as ideas unique to new media are explored, with particular emphasis on the role of the cinema.