Descartes made great advances in the physics of
light with tools like prisms. It was not until the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries that the physiol-
ogy of vision has been put on a solid grounding,
mostly through the work of neurologists, ex-
perimental psychologists, and cognitive scientists.
Though science has yet to produce a complete un-
derstanding of vision, Euclidean optics and Classi-
cal representation has, through the medium of
photography, permeated the vast majority of hu-
man societies.
AliHossainiSeealso:Camera: An Overview; Camera Obscura;
Depth of Field; Lens; Perspective; Photographic
‘‘Truth’’
Further Reading
Alberti, Leon Battiste.On Painting. London: Penguin Clas-
sics, 1972.
Crary, Jonathan.Techniques of the Observer. Cambridge,
MA: The MIT Press, 1993.
Edgerton, Samuel.The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear
Perspective. New York: Basic Books, 1975.
Edgerton, Samuel. The Heritage of Giotto’s Geometry.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991.
Euclid, trans. Harry Edwin Burton. ‘‘The Optics of Euclid.’’
Journal of the Optical Society of America. Vol. 35. no. 5
(1945): 357–372.
Gibson, J. J.The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception.
Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1986.
Gombrich, E. H.The Heritage of Apelles. London: Phaidon
Press, 1976.
Grant, Edward, and John E. Murdoch.Mathematics and Its
Applications to Science and Natural Philosophy in the
Middle Ages. New York: Cambridge University Press,
1987.
Kemp, Martin.The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Wes-
tern Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat. New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1990.
Kline, Morris.Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Mod-
ern Times, Vol. I. New York: Oxford University Press,
1972.
Lindberg, David C.Theories of Vision from al-Kindi to
Kepler. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.
Neugebauer, O.The Exact Sciences in Antiquity. Provi-
dence, RI: Brown University Press, 1957.
Nissen, Hans, et al., trans. Paul Larsen.Archaic Bookkeep-
ing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
Ptolemy, Claudius.The Geography. Mineola, NY: Dover
Publications, 1991.
Sabra, A. I.Ibn al-Haytham’s Optics, Volumes I & II. (Stu-
dies of the Warburg Institute, vol. 40) London: The
Warburg Institute, 1989.
Steadman, Philip.Vermeer’s Camera. London: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2001.
White, John.The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space.
Boston: Boston Book and Art Shop, 1967.PAUL OUTERBRIDGE JR.
American
A master of color photography known for his care-
fully composed still-lifes and the psychologically
complex eroticism of his nudes studies, Paul Outer-
bridge Jr. was a relentless perfectionist attracted to
the sensuous qualities of the photographic object.
His career began in the formalist abstraction of the
1920s avant-garde, while his later work turned to
questions of sexuality and the construction of narra-
tive. Although he staunchly asserted photography’s
independence as an art form, his preparatory sketch-
esandattentiontomaterialsandprocessing—notto
mention the formal and thematic references found in
his images—often bore close affinities to painting
and printmaking.
Born into a wealthy New York City family, Out-
erbridge led a privileged early life, attending private
schools and studying drawing and aesthetics at the
Art Students League. As a young man he was an
enthusiastic contributor to the city’s art and theater
scenes, finding work as a poster illustrator and set
designer. During World War I, he served briefly in
the Royal Flying Corps in Canada and began tak-
ing photographs in 1917 as documentation of mili-
tary installations while serving in the U.S. Army in
Oregon. After travels to Hollywood and Bermuda,
Outerbridge decided to devote himself to photogra-
phy, returning to New York in 1921 to marry Paula
Smith and enroll in the Clarence H. White School of
Photography. Clarence White’s Pictorialist back-
ground fed Outerbridge’s interest in the physicalOUTERBRIDGE JR., PAUL