Lens, laboratory, landscape : observing modern Spain / Claudia Schaefer.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Schaefer, Claudia, 1949- author.

Series:

SUNY series in Latin American and Iberian thought and culture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Material culture--Spain--History--19th century.

Material culture.

Material culture--Spain--History--20th century.

Science--Social aspects.

History.

Art and society.

Intellectual life.

Spain--Intellectual life--History--19th century.

Spain.

Spain--Intellectual life--History--20th century.

Art and society--Spain--History--19th century.

Art and society--Spain--History--20th century.

Science--Social aspects--Spain--History--19th century.

Science.

Science--Social aspects--Spain--History--20th century.

Visual perception.

Observation (Scientific method).

Ramón y Cajal, Santiago, 1852-1934.

Ramón y Cajal, Santiago.

Genre:

History.

Physical Description:

xiii, 239 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Albany : State University of New York Press, [2014]

Summary:

Focuses on competing views about the power of vision in Spain between the 1830s and the 1950s. The photographic lens, laboratory microscope, "retinal vision" of philosopher José Ortega Y Gasset, and the topographical studies of Manuel de Terán are woven together in and around a European cultural milieu that gave observation primacy. For once, Spain-now bereft of its empire-was not on the outside of such debates. Whether in the laboratory, family home, darkroom, art gallery, or on the road, in Cuba or Zaragoza, Madrid or Massachusetts, Spanish artists and scientists were engaged with the social and economic power of observation at a time when the speed of modern life made observing a challenge. Claudia Schaefer brings the technologies of the eye-photograph, microscope, lens, tools for land surveying-to light as markers on the nation's touted path to modernity. Book jacket.

Contents:

Introduction

The creation of a new scientific persona : Santiago Ramón y Cajal and the rise of popular photography in Spain

The curtain rises on the magic theater of life : Cajal, master of light and color

Matter, time, and landscape : ways of seeing in Cajal, Ortega, and Benjamin

Science as a two-way street : contradictory traces of modernity in Dalí and Terán

Conclusion : a last look at observation.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781438452739

143845273X

OCLC:

871043029