The reality effect refers to the use of extreme detail to create an image (whether written, spoken, or made visual) that attests to an eye-witness account, and by extension, that what is being described is a truthful rendition. It is a tactic that may be used to distract a viewer from a subtext that is present by hyper-detailed description or...

The pictorialist movement in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century photography seemed to reinforce the normative gender and moral codes of the period. If nude bodies were shown, it was usually with a moralizing or allegorizing intent, much like history painting. Even in nineteenth-century painting, there are many examples of paintings of...

In the nineteenth-century, the word phantasmagoria referred to a type of popular entertainment that made use of literal smoke and mirrors to produce an optical illusion. The viewers of these productions knew that what they were seeing was not real, but the phantasmagoria did not reveal how it was made. The means by which the illusion was created...

Charles Baudelaire, in his poem “The Eyes of the Poor” reveals the mixing of classes that occurred with Haussmannization in Paris.  In the poem, a lower-class family walks down a new boulevard and looks in the cafes at the bourgeois patrons. The narrator seems to have an anthropologist’s detached interest in the family. He is content to watch...

Alfred Hitchcock’s film Rear Window situates the protagonist, a photographer, as a panoptic “eye” that watches all the goings-on of his neighbors. Jeff is confined to a wheelchair and unable to leave his apartment so he begins to obsessively watch his neighbors through their unshuttered windows. Jeff’s apartment is located in a perfect spot that...