Acclaimed French photographer, filmmaker and journalist Raymond Depardon arrived in New York in the winter of 1980. He came to visit a friend who had just taken a job in the city, and to kill time he strolled around the streets with his Leica. As a self-imposed constraint, and to encourage serendipitous results, he decided to take pictures without ever using the camera's viewfinder. Working incognito throughout the nooks and crannies of New York City, Depardon amassed two or three rolls a day--but when the time came to assess the results, he was thoroughly disappointed. He never mentioned the experiment to anybody and has only now decided to unveil these blind" pictures to his public. Reexamining the work some 27 years "after the photographs were taken, Depardon was surprised to discover that most of his subjects were aware that they were being photographed, and that consequently the images contain more artifice than he had expected. His subjects project an affect of indifference in their knowing glances towards the camera lens, thereby immortalizing the very spirit and charm of 1980s New York, a period for which there is increasing fondness and nostalgia today. With an essay by the great philosopher Paul Virilio, this monograph opens up an exciting and hitherto lost chapter in Depardon's storied career."...

A rich and suggestive analysis of military “ways of seeing,” revealing the convergence of perception and destruction in the parallel technologies of warfare and cinema.

“One of the most original thinkers of our time.” --Libération

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Virilio himself referred to his 1980 work The Aesthetics of Disappearance as a "juncture" in his thinking, one at which he brought his focus onto the logistics of perception—a logistics he would soon come to refer to as the "vision machine." If Speed and Politics established Virilio as the inaugural—and still consummate—theorist of "dromology" (the theory of speed and the society it defines), The Aesthetics of Disappearance introduced his understanding of "picnolepsy"—the epileptic state of consciousness produced by speed, or rather, the consciousness invented by the subject through its very absence: the gaps, glitches, and speed bumps lacing through and defining it. Speed and Politics defined the society of speed; The Aesthetics of Disappearance defines what it feels like to live in the society of speed.

"I always write with images," Virilio has claimed, and this statement is nowhere better illustrated than with The Aesthetics of Disappearance. Moving from the movie theater to the freeway, and from Craig Breedlove's attainment of terrifying speed in a rocket-power car to the immobility of Howard Hughes in his dark room atop the Desert Inn, Virilio himself jump cuts from such disparate reference points as Fred Astaire, Franz Liszt, and Adolf Loos to Dostoyevsky, Paul Morand, and Aldous Huxley. In its extension of the "aesthetics of disappearance" to war, film, and politics, this book paved the way to Virilio's follow-up: the celebrated study, War and Cinema.

This edition features a new introduction by Jonathan Crary, one of the leading theorists of modern visual culture.

Foreign Agents series
Distributed for Semiotext(e)...

Out of print for almost a decade we are thrilled to bring back one of our most requested hard-to-find titles—philosopher and cultural theorist Paul Virilio's Bunker Archeology. In 1994 we published the first English-language translation of the classic French edition of 1975 which accompanied an exhibition of Virilio's photographs at the Centre Pompidou. In Bunker Archeology urbanist Paul Virilio turns his attention—and camera—to the ominous yet strangely compelling German bunkers that lie abandoned along the coast of France. These ghostly reminders of destruction and oppression prompted Virilio to consider the nature of war and existence in relation to both World War II and contemporary times. Virilio discusses fortresses and military space in general as well as the bunkers themselves including an examination of the role of Albert Speer Hitler's architect in the rise of the Third Reich....