Véronique Vienne

Writer; Editor; Lecturer / Graphic Design / France /

Books Every Graphic Designer Should Read

. . . I am sure that soon enough a genius will come up with an iPhone GPS app that can tell me where I stowed away my copy of In Praise of Shadows by Jun’ichiro Tanizaki, Diana Vreeland’s memoirs, or the English translation of Boris Vian’s endearing novel L’Ecume des Jours. They are among the books that have helped me understand what design criticism is all about. I’d like to make an argument that they should be on the list of “Books Every Graphic Designer Should Read.” Meanwhile, I recently pulled from my bookcase ten odd volumes I’d like to put on that list as well. . . . View the complete text
3 books
Jonathan Crary
If you love books with footnotes, as I do, you’ll enjoy reading the work of Jonathan Crary. Footnotes are to books what lingerie is to clothes: the furtive underpinning of a narrative. Crary’s footnotes are chatty, gossipy and erudite. They are as fun to decipher as the text they annotate, and if you were to count the words, you’d find out that they are just as lengthy as the main document. Because of the footnotes, reading Crary’s books requires that you split your attention between the top and the bottom of each page, which is appropriate considering the subject matter of his dissertation: the history of human vision and the volatile role of attentiveness in Western culture. . . . View the complete text
Jonathan Crary

[Crary's] first book, Techniques of the Observer, is considered a classic. Its cover features an anatomical drawing of a frightened patient whose eye is undergoing a surgical intervention, an image that dramatically illustrates Crary’s own probing into the various forms of inquiry that are at the origins of our visual culture. His account of how the concept of “paying attention” was manufactured in the nineteenth century challenges the assumption that being mentally focused is a natural state.

Also see my comments on Suspensions of Perception for an appreciation of Crary’s work.

John Berger
. . . Influenced by Walter Benjamin‘s seminal essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, [Ways of Seeing] attempts to expose a conspiracy that has kept the work of artists, and the ideologies their images promote, out of the political discourse. Adapted from a four-part BBC television series, it is a direct transcription of Berger’s script, and it reads as such, as a series of declarative sentences and short emphatic statements. A British painter as well as a novelist, a poet, and art critic, Berger speaks confidently about topics that are familiar to him. His point of view is always based on experience—on what it feels like to paint, observe, touch, watch, look, see, and be seen. . . . View the complete text
comments powered by Disqus