by Jon Lackman | 8 April 2008 | Awards
Mark Feeney has won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for criticism, “for his penetrating and versatile command of the visual arts, from film and photography to painting.” An excerpt from one of the Boston Globe articles that won him the award:
Something astonishing happened over the second two-thirds of the 19th century and first decade of the 20th, something so unprecedented as to come almost immediately to be taken for granted. It was, quite simply, this: Optics and engineering combined to reinvent seeing. One would have to go back to Lascaux and the first cave paintings to find a comparable shift in visual perception.
The most obvious form this reinvention took was the motion picture. Yet the movies only marked the culmination of a decades-long series of developments that included dioramas and flip books (the latter was patented as recently as 1868), such rudimentary devices for projecting motion as the zoetrope and thaumatrope, and the photographic motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Marey. For the first time, duration entered visual representation.
