Ways of Seeing After Dark (Forerunners: Ideas First)

Rethinking darkness through the politics and possibilities of visionDarkness is widely misunderstood, argues Kyle Parry.We take darkness as the enemy of sight, yet we can't see without it.We call the worst parts of our lives dark, yet we wouldn't be here without wombs, skulls, oceans, the moon, and other shadowed places.Ways of Seeing After Dark contends that darkness is not absence but presence, shaping how worlds are sensed, inhabited, and understood.Darkness brings peril, but it is also a fundamental, if increasingly threatened, condition of living together on this planet. Tracing links between John Berger's influential Ways of Seeing and his more poetic later writings, Parry recasts contemporary conditions defined by light pollution, digital mediation, and racialized regimes of seeing.In dialogue with artists, critics, and astronomers, Ways of Seeing After Dark examines how fear of darkness is built rather than universal and how such training intersects with broader social structur