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disgorgedintotalrecall:

In Techniques of the Observer, Jonathan Crary argues that a radical reconfiguration of vision took place in the early decades of the nineteenth century. The early modern camera obscura and the modern stereoscope emblematize this transformation for Crary, supplying a kind of diptych for his argument. (Crary is not a technological determinist; the transformation of seeing is not causally dependent on these devices. Instead, Crary takes a Deleuzian approach: such material technologies existed only in assemblages with other social forces, regimes of knowledge, and networks of spaces.)

The camera obscura model, dominant in early modernity, assumed a rational observer to be set apart from a “pre-given world of objective truth” (40). The observer’s visual perception was a “mechanical apparatus” that infallibly transcribed reality (39). The body’s other senses did not pollute this efficient, direct, and objective process. The historical basis for this understanding can be found in philosophers Diderot and Descartes, as well as artists Vermeer, Cadaletto, and J.B Chardin.

The camera obscura model broke down in the 1820s and 1830s. This rupture can be seen most clearly in an analysis of stereoscopes (though Crary also considers such visual toys as phenakistiscopes, thaumatropes, zootropes, kaleidoscopes, and dioramas). In viewing a stereoscope, Crary argues, it is perception itself that was made visible—not a fixed external image ‘out there.’

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