Thinking Through Images

by Christopher Tilley

Author	: Christopher Tilley
Publisher	: Oxbow Books
Total Pages	: 580
Release	: 2021-10-13
Genre	: Social Science
ISBN	: 1789257026

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This book provides a general self-reflexive review and critical analysis of Scandinavian rock art from the standpoint of Chris Tilley’s research in this area over the last thirty years. It offers a novel alternative theoretical perspective stressing the significance of visual narrative structure and rhythm, using musical analogies, putting particular emphasis on the embodied perception of images in a landscape context. Part I reviews the major theories and interpretative perspectives put forward to understand the images, in historical perspective, and provides a critique discussing each of the main types of motifs occurring on the rocks. Part II outlines an innovative theoretical and methodological perspective for their study stressing sequence and relationality in bodily movement from rock to rock. Part III is a detailed case study and analysis of a series of rocks from northern Bohuslän in western Sweden. The conclusions reflect on the theoretical and methodological approach being taken in relation to the disciplinary practices involved in rock art research, and its future.

Unflattening

by Nick Sousanis

Author	: Nick Sousanis
Publisher	: Harvard University Press
Total Pages	: 209
Release	: 2015-04-20
Genre	: Art
ISBN	: 0674744438

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The primacy of words over images has deep roots in Western culture. But what if the two are inextricably linked, equal partners in meaning-making? Written and drawn entirely as comics, Unflattening is an experiment in visual thinking. Nick Sousanis defies conventional forms of scholarly discourse to offer readers both a stunning work of graphic art and a serious inquiry into the ways humans construct knowledge. Unflattening is an insurrection against the fixed viewpoint. Weaving together diverse ways of seeing drawn from science, philosophy, art, literature, and mythology, it uses the collage-like capacity of comics to show that perception is always an active process of incorporating and reevaluating different vantage points. While its vibrant, constantly morphing images occasionally serve as illustrations of text, they more often connect in nonlinear fashion to other visual references throughout the book. They become allusions, allegories, and motifs, pitting realism against abstraction and making us aware that more meets the eye than is presented on the page. In its graphic innovations and restless shape-shifting, Unflattening is meant to counteract the type of narrow, rigid thinking that Sousanis calls “flatness.” Just as the two-dimensional inhabitants of Edwin A. Abbott’s novella Flatland could not fathom the concept of “upwards,” Sousanis says, we are often unable to see past the boundaries of our current frame of mind. Fusing words and images to produce new forms of knowledge, Unflattening teaches us how to access modes of understanding beyond what we normally apprehend.

Thinking with Images

by John M. Carvalho

Author	: John M. Carvalho
Publisher	: Routledge
Total Pages	: 252
Release	: 2018-08-06
Genre	: Art
ISBN	: 0429869916

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This book advances an enactivist theory of aesthetics through the study of inscrutable artworks that challenge us to think because we do not know what to think about them. John M. Carvalho presents detailed analyses a four artworks that share this unique characteristic: Francis Bacon’s Study After Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953), the photographs of Duane Michals, based on a retrospective of his work, Storyteller, at the Carnegie Museum of Art (2014), Étant donnés (1968) by Marcel Duchamp, and Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 film Le Mépris (released in the United States as Contempt). Carvalho argues against the application of theory to derive appreciation or meaning from these artistic works. Rather, each study enacts an embodied cognitive engagement with the specific artworks intended to demonstrate the value of thinking about artworks that might be extended to our engagement with the world in general. This thinking happens, as these studies show, when we trust our embodied skills and their guide to what artworks and the world around us afford for the activation and refinement of those skills. Thinking with Images will be of interest to scholars working in the philosophy of art and philosophical aesthetics, as well as art historians concerned with the meaning and value of contemporary art.

Thinking in Pictures

by Temple Grandin

Author	: Temple Grandin
Publisher	: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages	: 228
Release	: 2009-09-07
Genre	: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN	: 1408807300

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The idea that some people think differently, though no less humanly, is explored in this inspiring book. Temple Grandin is a gifted and successful animal scientist, and she is autistic. Here she tells us what it was like to grow up perceiving the world in an entirely concrete and visual way - somewhat akin to how animals think, she believes - and how it feels now. Through her finely observed understanding of the workings of her mind she gives us an invaluable insight into autism and its challenges.

Visual Thinking Strategies

by Philip Yenawine

Author	: Philip Yenawine
Publisher	: Harvard Education Press
Total Pages	: 219
Release	: 2013-10-01
Genre	: Education
ISBN	: 1612506119

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2014 Outstanding Academic Title, Choice "What’s going on in this picture?" With this one question and a carefully chosen work of art, teachers can start their students down a path toward deeper learning and other skills now encouraged by the Common Core State Standards. The Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) teaching method has been successfully implemented in schools, districts, and cultural institutions nationwide, including bilingual schools in California, West Orange Public Schools in New Jersey, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It provides for open-ended yet highly structured discussions of visual art, and significantly increases students’ critical thinking, language, and literacy skills along the way. Philip Yenawine, former education director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art and cocreator of the VTS curriculum, writes engagingly about his years of experience with elementary school students in the classroom. He reveals how VTS was developed and demonstrates how teachers are using art—as well as poems, primary documents, and other visual artifacts—to increase a variety of skills, including writing, listening, and speaking, across a range of subjects. The book shows how VTS can be easily and effectively integrated into elementary classroom lessons in just ten hours of a school year to create learner-centered environments where students at all levels are involved in rich, absorbing discussions.

Thinking in Pictures

by Temple Grandin

Author	: Temple Grandin
Publisher	: Vintage
Total Pages	: 244
Release	: 1996
Genre	: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN	: 9780679772897

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In this unprecedented book, a gifted animal scientist who is also autistic, delivers a report on autism, written from her unique perspective. What emerges is the document of an extraordinary human being, one who bridges the gulf between her condition and our own, shedding light on the riddle of our common identity.

Looking Through Images

by Emmanuel Alloa

Author	: Emmanuel Alloa
Publisher	: Columbia University Press
Total Pages	: 290
Release	: 2021-10-05
Genre	: Philosophy
ISBN	: 0231547579

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Images have always stirred ambivalent reactions. Yet whether eliciting fascinated gazes or iconoclastic repulsion from their beholders, they have hardly ever been seen as true sources of knowledge. They were long viewed as mere appearances, placeholders for the things themselves or deceptive illusions. Today, the traditional critique of the spectacle has given way to an unconditional embrace of the visual. However, we still lack a persuasive theoretical account of how images work. Emmanuel Alloa retraces the history of Western attitudes toward the visual to propose a major rethinking of images as irreplaceable agents of our everyday engagement with the world. He examines how ideas of images and their powers have been constructed in Western humanities, art theory, and philosophy, developing a novel genealogy of both visual studies and the concept of the medium. Alloa reconstructs the earliest Western media theory—Aristotle’s concept of the diaphanous milieu of vision—and the significance of its subsequent erasure in the history of science. Ultimately, he argues for a historically informed phenomenology of images and visual media that explains why images are not simply referential depictions, windows onto the world. Instead, images constantly reactivate the power of appearing. As media of visualization, they allow things to appear that could not be visible except in and through these very material devices.

Thinking Like Einstein

by Thomas G. West

Author	: Thomas G. West
Publisher	: Prometheus Books
Total Pages	: 222
Release	: 2010-03-05
Genre	: Computers
ISBN	: 1615922970

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Albert Einstein once said that all of his most important and productive thinking was done by playing with images in his imagination. Only in a secondary stage did he translate - with great effort, he says - these images into the language of words and mathematics that could be understood by others. According to Thomas G. West, Einstein was a classic example of a strong visual thinker, a person who tends to think in images and visual patterns, and sometimes has difficulty with words and numbers. In his awarding-winning book, In the Mind''s Eye, West discussed the connections between highly talented, visually oriented persons like Einstein and certain learning disabilities such as dyslexia. Now, in Thinking Like Einstein, West investigates the new worlds of visual thinking, insight, and creativity made possible by computer graphics and information visualization technologies. He argues that, with the rapid spread of inexpensive and powerful computers, we are now at the beginning of a major transition, moving from an old world based mainly on words and numbers to a new world where high level work in all fields will eventually involve insights based on the display and manipulation of complex information using moving computer images. West profiles several highly creative visual thinkers, such as James Clerk Maxwell, Nikola Tesla, and Richard Feynman, pointing out that there is a long history of using visualization rather than words or numbers to solve problems. Citing the longstanding historical conflicts between image lovers and image haters, West examines the relationship of art, scientific knowledge, and differences in brain capabilities - observing how modern visual thinkers with visualization technologies seem to have learned how to cut through the problems of overspecialization in academia and in the workplace. West predicts that computer visualization technology will radically change the way we all work and think. For thousands of years the technology of writing and reading has tended to promote the dominance of the left hemisphere of the brain, with its linear processing of words and numbers. Now the spread of graphical computer technologies is permitting a return to our visual roots with a new balance between hemispheres and ways of thinking - presenting new opportunities for problem solving and big picture thinking. Thus, he argues that the newest technologies will help us to reaffirm some of our oldest capabilities, allowing us to see previously unseen patterns and to restore a balance in thought and action.

The Heart of the Photograph

by David Duchemin

Author	: David Duchemin
Publisher	: Rocky Nook, Inc.
Total Pages	: 291
Release	: 2020-03-17
Genre	: Photography
ISBN	: 1681985470

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Learn to ask better, more helpful questions of your work so that you can create stronger and more powerful photographs.

Photographers often look at an image—one they’ve either already created or are in the process of making—and ask themselves a simple question: “Is this a good photograph?” It’s an understandable question, but it’s really not very helpful. How are you supposed to answer that? What does “good” even mean? Is it the same for everyone?

What if you were equipped to ask better, more constructive questions of your work so that you could think more intentionally and creatively, and in doing so, bring more specific action and vision to the act of creating photographs? What if asking stronger questions allowed you to establish a more effective approach to your image-making? In The Heart of the Photograph: 100 Questions for Making Stronger, More Expressive Photographs, photographer and author David duChemin helps you learn to ask better questions of your work in order to craft more successful photographs—photographs that express and connect, photographs that are strong and, above all, photographs that are truly yours.

From the big-picture questions—What do I want this image to accomplish?—to the more detail-oriented questions that help you get there—What is the light doing? Where do the lines lead? What can I do about it?—David walks you through his thought process so that you can establish your own. Along the way, he discusses the building blocks from which compelling photographs are made, such as gesture, balance, scale, contrast, perspective, story, memory, symbolism, and much more. The Heart of the Photograph is not a theoretical book. It is a practical and useful book that equips you to think more intentionally as a photographer and empowers you to ask more helpful questions of you and your work, so that you can produce images that are not only better than “good,” but as powerful and authentic as you hope them to be.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Better Questions

PART ONE: A GOOD PHOTOGRAPH?
Is It Good?
The Audience's Good
The Photographer's Good

PART TWO: BETTER THAN GOOD
Better Subjects

PART THREE: BETTER EXPRESSION
Exploration and Expression
What Is the Light Doing?
What Does Colour Contribute?
What Role Do the Lines and Shapes Play?
What's Your Point of View?
What Is the Quality of the Moment?
Where Is the Story?
Where Is the Contrast?
What About Balance and Tension?
What Is the Energy?
How Can I Use Space and Scale?
Can I Go Deeper?
What About the Frame?
Do the Elements Repeat?
Harmony
Can I Exclude More?
Where Does the Eye Go?
How Does It Feel?
Where's the Mystery?
Remember When?
Can I Use Symbols?
Am I Being Too Literal?

PART FOUR: BETTER PHOTOGRAPHS
The Heart of the Photograph
Index