Seeing the Social: Selected Visibility Technologies

In Seeing the Social 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.

Seeing the Social is historically rigorous and where possible relies on primary texts. What is different about what it does with these moments is the attempt to tie these technologies to seeing the social and allowing the narrative, sometimes in dialogue form, to convey the story. The author moves away from the idea that grand philosophical or theoretical knowledge accounts tell the complete story, preferring rather to allow some minor actors to shed light on the subject. The book also attempts to steer away from being theory or theorist driven. Rather it allows these early moments of surprise and wonderment to be heard. This approach hopefully opens up visual spaces for the reader and encourages further research and reading.