Marcel Proust offered the twentieth century a new psychology of memory and seeing. His novel In Search of Lost Time was written in the modern age of photography and art history. In Looking Back One Learns to See: Marcel Proust and Photography brings to light Proust’s photographic resources and his visual imagination. This scrupulously researched book features over 100 illustrations.
Distinguished cultural historian Mary Bergstein presents various kinds of photography and photographic systems with regard to the literature of Marcel Proust, including daguerreotypes, stereoscopic cards, cartes-de-visite, postcards, book illustrations, portraiture, medical photography, spirit photography, architectural photography, and Orientalism. Photographs associated with fin-de-siècle studies of Botticelli, Leonardo, and Vermeer, are considered in terms of Proust’s tastes and the historiography of art.