Lens, Laboratory, Landscape(English, Hardcover, Schaefer Claudia)

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Lens, Laboratory, Landscape(English, Hardcover, Schaefer Claudia) is written by Schaefer Claudia and published by State University of New York Press. It's available with International Standard Book Number or ISBN identification 143845273X (ISBN 10) and 9781438452739 (ISBN 13).

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 Jose Ortega y Gasset, and the topographical studies of Manuel de Teran 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.