Photography and Scopic Regimes

Abstract

Martin Jay’s conception of “scopic regime” is the key access to our vision, it s meanings and its socio-historical aspect. Like him, Peter Galassi and Jonathan Crary outline the rupture between the modern regime of vision and Renaissance or classical mode of vision, both of which underpinned the structural change in the Western history of vision. ltalian Renaissance art is identified with the rationalistic and decorporealizing scopic regime, what Jay calls Cartesian perspectivism and what Crary calls the camera obscura model of vision. In opposition of it, for Galassi, stands the Dutch 17th century art as the root of photography. Crary insists that various optical devices including photography brought about the rupture between perception and its object, and the reconstruction of vision, from the late 18th century to the early 19th century. As modernization of vision has proceeded since then, we have come into the computer-aided image production at the risk of increasing the distance of perceptive subject and its object. Recent pervading of 3-D and stereoscopic planar images based on the tactile perception may be a sign of baroque-like recovery from the predominant rational perspective vision.