The power of images: a history of visuality from the beginnings of photography up to the digital present.
Gerhard Paul traces the history of modernity as a visual age, describing not only the history of images, but also the history of visual practices in the 19th and 20th centuries.
In his opus magnum, he analyses almost a thousand images from areas as diverse as advertising and propaganda, science and publishing, police practice and warfare. Paul vividly shows how extra-pictorial reality is being increasingly structured according to iconographic and media rules. He clearly demonstrates how the general rules of presentability are violated again and again, causing a permanent shift in the zones of visibility and non-visibility.
With »The Visual Age – Dot & Pixel«, Gerhard Paul presents a comprehensive and opulently illustrated history of the images and image practices of modernity – a definitive work on the theme of visual history.
Gerhard Paul, born in 1951, is a professor of history and didactics at the University of Flensburg. Publications include: Sound des Jahrhunderts. Geräusche, Töne, Stimmen – 1889 bis heute (Sound of the Century. Sounds, Tones, Voices – 1889 to the Present Day, co-ed., 2014); BilderMACHT. Studien zur Visual History des 20. und
21. Jahrhunderts (ImagePOWER. Studies on the Visual History of the 20th and 21st Centuries, 2013); Das Jahrhundert der Bilder (The Century of Images, ed., 2 vols, 2008/09).
