Despite the sharedhuman experience in which spaces appear radically different depending on time,season, and weather, social science investigation on the subject is meager. FromLight to Dark fills this gap, focusing on our interaction with daylight,illumination, and darkness and analyzing a vast array of artisticinterventions, diverse spaces, and lighting technologies to explore these mostbasic human experiences.
Table of Contents:
Contents
Introduction: Geographies of Light and Dark
Part I. Light
1. Seeing with Landscape, Seeing with Light
2. Under the Dynamic Sky: Living and Creating with Light
Part II. Illumination
3. Electric Desire: Lighting the Vernacular and Illuminating Nostalgia
4. Caught in the Light: Power, Inequality, and Illumination
5. Festivals of Illumination: Painting and Playing with Light
6. Staging Atmosphere: Public Extravaganzas and Homely Designs
Part III. Dark
7. Nocturnes: Changing Meanings of Darkness
8. The Re-enchantment of Darkness: The Pleasures of Noir
Conclusion: The Novelty of Light and the Value of Darkness
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Index
About the Author :
Tim Edensor teaches cultural geography at Manchester Metropolitan University (UK). He is the author of Tourists at the Taj; National Identity, Popular Culture, and Everyday Life; and Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics, and Materiality.
Review :
"Illumination is one of the aspects of life that has become so obvious we have stopped noticing it. In this innovative and illuminating book, Tim Edensor provides an elegant and necessary account of light and dark, their role in the production of everyday life, the stories we tell about them, and the emotions they engender. He has performed a key task of any critical thinker-taking the obvious and making it visible again."-Tim Cresswell, Trinity College
"The wealth of sources and documents one finds in From Light to Dark is one of the great merits of the book."-Leonardo
"With many such insights and many more examples of the ways in which we may reframe the scholarship of modern perception and sensory experience, From Light to Dark certainly deserve[s] further attention."-Journal of Design History
