The Eye as Machine

Abstract

Despite all the warnings from theorists, despite the fact that deceptive images are a recurring theme in the pages of the media, the image in perspective, especially in its optical version, continues to be the dominant model, either explicitly (photography, film, the media) or “implicitly” (the unconfessed yearning of many museums to return to realism every once in a while). Our culture has learned to reconcile the optical image and aesthetic movements that support its overthrow without too many problems, very often for the sake of the characteristics of our perception, which, a couple of centuries ago, ceased being able to be explained on the basis of the functioning of the camera obscura. In this text, I analyse the relationships between photography, vision and perspective; how what in the beginning was a representation guideline of the three-dimensional space in the two dimensions of the plane has become an epistemological model whose consequences reach the world of politics.