John Ruskin, un œil européen La photographie, la peinture, l’écriture et l’énigme de la visibilité

Abstract

My analysis of the question of sight, vision, gaze and the visible in John Ruskin’s work will consist of three moments: 1) the delimitation of the problem I propose to address, 2) the photographic temptation that was Ruskin’s, 3) the question of the innocence of the eye and the pure visibility that makes Ruskin a central maillon in the European aesthetics of the 19th and 20th centuries. The aim is to show how the English writer plays an important role in contemporary thinking about visibility in its artistic, scientific, aesthetic and philosophical implications. Since for Ruskin, «seeing involves the whole man».