Visions of Modernity: Representation, Memory, Time and Space in the Age of the Camera

This overview of modern visual culture explores the relationship between technology, society and identity which underpins contemporary `media culture'. While tracing historical shifts as they have developed through, or intersected with, different camera technologies, the book is not so much about the camera's field of vision: it is concerned with processes of modernization and the dramatic changes - perceptual, experiential, epistemological - which characterize modernity.

Using the camera and its technologies as symbols of `realism', Scott McQuire interweaves: the history of visual culture from Lumiere to virtual reality by way of photography, cinema and television; the broad social and political transformations of t