background picture: Jiro Takamatsu's solo exhibition Identification, Tokyo Gallery 1966 [cover picture]

528 pages, German, 96 b/w, 60 colour pictures, hardcover, Paderborn (Wilhelm Fink) 2015, ISBN: 978-3-7705-5958-9.

Shadow pictures radically changed the modern understanding of pictorial concepts. Tim Otto Roth’s broadly based cultural history traces the consequences of this revolution of methods of vision and image production in the sciences and the arts. By means of abundant image and text sources he develops a picture theory based on physics and projective geometry.

This definitive book provides a generally understandable and vivid insight in the history of shadowgraphs from the 19th century until the present age. A crucial role play scientific processes as the X-ray technique, but also the artistic examination of space and body. Pictures and their material genesis are analyzed in an almost criminalistics way – with particular reference for instance to Man Ray. Consequently art history is rewritten.

Cover picture: Jiro Takamatsu's solo exhibition Identification, Tokyo Gallery, 1966 [credit: Yumiko Chiba Associates/The Estate of Jiro Takamatsu]