Selected visibility technologies

Harry Freemantle looks closely at the early moments of visibility technologies like perspective, lenses (especially microscopes), the camera obscura, The Encyclopédie, the balloon, the lithograph, the diorama and photography, including the accompanying metaphors, in order to draw out how the visual aspects of seeing inform the articulable at particular moments in history. How these visibilities shift and change over time can then be charted against larger social movements. Such visibility technologies formed part of the epistemological conditions of the observer, underlay the discourse and contributed to how early writers on the social saw the emerging social world.