[Enlarged Movie Still with Image of Eye Closing and Opening]

Unknown

1920s–30s · Gelatin silver print · Photographs

This photograph was printed from a strip of movie film. Almost from the moment of cinema's invention by the Lumière brothers in the 1890s, artists recognized its potential to reveal startling new perceptions of the visible world. In the 1920s, film was celebrated by avant-garde artists as a means of reintroducing viewers to everyday sights already so well known that they no longer merited attention, such as blinking. The disembodied eye was a particularly useful image for artists and filmmakers associated with the international art movement called the New Vision, both because the eye symbolized pure sight and because a blink is a phenomenon that happens so quickly that the mechanical operations involved are hard to describe without the use of a camera. This effort to make viewers see anew had strong ideological connotations and was closely linked with the New Vision's leftist politics.

Artist

Unknown

Date

1920s–30s

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Department

Photographs

Credit line

Ford Motor Company Collection, Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987