Inadvertent Images

Fascinating. . . . Geimer's remarks on how the limitations of the human eye has led to the creation of perceptual prosthetics that allow us a foray into invisible worlds are truly exciting stuff! With comprehensive notes and index, along with many illustrations, this is a must for the student of philosophy, history of science, art or cultural history, or those with a technical interest in forensic photography. --Fortean Times Inadvertent Images offers crucial insight about the central epistemological problems of such a paradoxical visual medium. It provides an account of how photography was, and is, a contested terrain for the high-stakes questions of scientific realism. It responds with special nuance to fundamental, if familiar, queries: Can our theories, models, and representations tell us something--anything--about natural phenomena? Are photographs ever more than artifacts of their own contrived interventions into the natural world? With both historical specificity and a broad conceptual scope, Geimer poses these longstanding questions afresh, demanding that we reexamine some of our most fundamental premises. --CAA Reviews Cutting across art, science and the occult, intention and accident, archives and theory, message and noise, visibility and invisibility, Geimer weaves a history of photography that brims with insights and astonishes through its visual analyses. Indeed, Inadvertent Images is more than a history of photography: it is essential reading for anyone engaged with the promises and perils of images and vision in a technological age. --Noam M. Elcott, Columbia University The undeniable strength of Inadvertent Images lies in its theoretical lucidity and careful readings of specific, exemplary photographs. Peter Geimer compellingly analyzes the contingent histories of these images with an eye for wider theoretical implications that unsettle what we originally considered as the nature of photography. Geimer thus makes us look at technical, optical, and chemical materialities that constitute the noise and the verisimilitude of photographic images. --Stefan Andriopoulos, Columbia University