book — brookebelisle

Depth Effects uses dimensionality to rethink the history and theory of media aesthetics. It traces AI-enabled techniques of computational imaging back to spatial strategies of early photography, relating everyday smartphone apps to almost-forgotten media forms.

Drawing on the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, it explores depth both as a problem of visual representation (how can flat images depict a voluminous world?) and as a philosophical paradox (how do things appear to cohere beyond the limits of our view?).

It explains how today’s depth effects continue colonialist ambitions toward totalizing ways of seeing, but also shows how contemporary artists—including Trevor Paglen, Lorna Simpson, LaToya Ruby Frazier, and Andreas Gursky—stage dimensionality to articulate what remains invisible and irreducible.

UC Press

Amazon

In one brilliant analysis after another, Belisle details how the computationally produced grids, portraits, and maps of contemporary technical visual culture have interposed vast new layers of racialized abstraction between embodied viewers and the world; and she reintroduces all the 'other landscapes that remain to be seen.' Required reading.

-Laura Wexler, Charles H. Farnam Professor of American Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Yale University
Depth Effects offers a shimmeringly prismatic look at how imaging technologies past and present—from the photographic portrait to augmented reality—render the dimensional world and reveal our vantage point within it. Belisle trains our attention on the sutured and superimposed lenses and screens through which we behold ourselves and one another.

-Shannon Mattern, Penn Presidential Compact Professor of Media Studies and History of Art, University of Pennsylvania
Brooke Belisle has written an intellectually ambitious, theoretically expansive, and methodologically persuasive book that not only reframes but also models the micro and macro aspects of the technologies, aesthetics, and practices of computational visual culture.

-Vivian Sobchack, author of The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience
Depth Effects is an important book. Belisle’s scholarship is superb, her prose stylish and accessible, and her arguments offer critical resources for not only rethinking the 'photographic basis' of cinema and digital media, but also elaborating the computational.

-Scott Richmond, Director of the Centre for Culture and Technology, University of Toronto
Lucid and convincing, Depth Effects crafts a counter-history of photography that centers multi-perspectival capture rather than the singular, monocular still. This reframing offers a new perspective on computational aesthetics and identifies critical potentials of contemporary art.

-Kris Paulsen, author of Here/There: Telepresence, Touch, and Art at the Interface
Full of marvels! Inventively constructed and rigorously argued, Depth Effects offers an invaluable history of our photographically saturated present. Belisle articulates the computational ground of contemporary photography as routed through nineteenth-century technologies and aesthetics.

-James J. Hodge, author of Sensations of History: Animation and New Media Art
Depth Effects is a critical and necessary corrective to how we think about contemporary visual culture—computer vision algorithms shaping the future of AI and smartphone modes that both evoke and shatter photographic aesthetics. Essential reading for anyone interested in the long history of digital images.

-Jacob Gaboury, author of Image Objects: An Archaeology of Computer Graphics
Elegantly conceived and beautifully written, Depth Effects combines the technical precision of the best media studies with the formal precision of the best art history. Moving past discourses of index and ideology, it considers distinctively twenty-first-century logics of display, value, and racial subjectivity.

-Kris Cohen, author of Never Alone, Except for Now: Art, Networks, Populations

Introduction - Dimensional Aesthetics

Entrelacs I - Depth

Chapter 1 - The Sidedness of Things: Object Recognition and Computer Vision

Entrelacs II - How a Cube Coheres

Chapter 2 - Surfacing Subjectivity: Portrait Mode and Computational Photography

Entrelacs 3 - Unfinished Incarnation

Chapter 3 - Visible World: Photographic Maps and Computuational Photogrammetry

Entrelacs 4 - Other Landscapes

Brooke Belisle has written an intellectually ambitious, theoretically expansive, and methodologically persuasive book that not only reframes but also models the micro and macro aspects of the technologies, aesthetics, and practices of computational visual culture.

Depth Effects is an important book. Belisle’s scholarship is superb, her prose stylish and accessible, and her arguments offer critical resources for not only rethinking the 'photographic basis' of cinema and digital media, but also elaborating the computational.

Lucid and convincing, Depth Effects crafts a counter-history of photography that centers multi-perspectival capture rather than the singular, monocular still. This reframing offers a new perspective on computational aesthetics and identifies critical potentials of contemporary art.

Full of marvels! Inventively constructed and rigorously argued, Depth Effects offers an invaluable history of our photographically saturated present. Belisle articulates the computational ground of contemporary photography as routed through nineteenth-century technologies and aesthetics.

Table of Contents