Bibliograph

Lens, laboratory, landscape, observing modern Spain, Claudia Schaefer

Type

Label

Lens, laboratory, landscape, observing modern Spain, Claudia Schaefer

Language

eng

Index

no index present

Literary Form

non fiction

Main title

Lens, laboratory, landscape

Medium

electronic resource

Nature of contents

dictionaries

Responsibility statement

Claudia Schaefer

Series statement

SUNY series in Latin American and Iberian thought and culture

Sub title

observing modern Spain

Summary

An interdisciplinary study of the rise of empirical observation in the Spanish arts and sciences as the principle vehicle for acquiring knowledge about the natural world. Lens, Laboratory, Landscape 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

Target audience

adult

Classification