Berger and McCloud

McCloud: Your thoughts.

Why is this relevant to what we are doing for the project?

Berger:

On the use of perspective in painting:
"The convention of perspective... centers everything on the ey of the beholder."
"The conventions call those appearances reality. Perspective makes the single eye the center of the visible world. Everything converges on to the eye as to the vanishing point of infinity." "The visible world is arranged for the spectator as the universe was once thought to be arranged for God." (p. 16)

How the camera shook things up. "I, the machine, show you a world the way only I see it":
"The camera isolated momentary appearances and in do doing destroyed the idea that images were timeless." (p. 17)
"[T]he camera showed that the notion of time passing was inseparable from the expereince of the visual (except in painting). What you say depended on where you were when. What you saw was relative to you position in time and space. It was no longer possible to imagine everything converging on the human eye as a vanishing point of infinity."
"The invention of the camera changed the way men (sic.) saw." (p. 18)

"Original paintings are silent and still in a sense that information never is." (p. 31)

Vermeer's Woman Pouring Milk

Van Gogh's Wheatfield with Crows








This is the last picture that Van Gogh painted before he killed himself.