3D History, Theory and Aesthetics of the Transplane Image

What if, instead of writing the history of those things that have become the cultural dominant, we were to write the history of the overlooked - of those other, non-victorious cultural forms that the march of history pushed into the shade? And what if the history in question is that of visual media, from Daguerre to the present?

Jens Schröter's inquiry begins as a project of 'minor' history, tracing the development of one among the many visual media existing in the shadows of the dominant: the 3-D (or 'transplane') image. In the course of excavating this particular terrain something larger and more dangerous is unearthed: the systematic blind-spots, exclusions, red herrings, and cul-de-sacs that have helped to shape the shiny new discipline of the history of visuality. Warning: this book may cause the reader to lose faith in a number of cherished beliefs concerning visual regimes and their periodization, and the viability of such concepts as embodied spectatorship, the physiological paradigm of vision, and the theoretical fiction known as 'the observer.