With its many color photographs, a print edition of The Eye Is a Door would have been priced beyond the reach of many readers. As an e-book on Amazon.com, it is priced at $4.99.
Designing The Eye Is a Door as an e-book permitted a fluid relationship between image and text, where neither dominates the other. The reader encounters the same image within the context of both visual and verbal essays, and a single image may appear in the text at several different points. Rather than paging back and forth, simply touch an icon at the end of a sentence, and the associated image fills the screen. Touch again and return to the text. A new kind of reading.
The Eye Is a Door website (www.theeyeisadoor.com) complements the e-book. Read sample chapters. View the photo essays. Visit the exhibit and read the reviews. Watch a video. Take a trip to the places depicted in the photographs. The latter section, Journey, links photographs and associated text with Google Earth. Click on a photograph and be transported to a satellite view of the place, where you can take control of the mouse and explore on your own.
The Eye Is a Door is also an exhibition, organized by the Smith College Museum of Art in Northampton, Massachusetts, which has is available to travel to other venues. The exhibit explores how my photographs “encourage a deeper understanding of the natural and built environment through the development of visual literacy — the ability to read and analyze visual information.”
Two pages from the six-page brochure prepared by the Smith College Museum of Art, distributed to all museum visitors.
Smith College Museum of Art. “...simultaneously gorgeous and chaste. There’s a matter-of-fact flawlessness to these photographs,” Mark Feeney, The Boston Globe art critic, February 25, 2014.
Smith College Museum of Art. A wide range of courses at Smith used the exhibit: from art to environmental studies and geology, to anthropology, literary studies, history and dance. The exhibit was also used in teaching visual literacy to K-12 classes.
University of Arkansas, School of Architecture. October 2014.
The Eye Is a Door grew out of my experience as an author, photographer, landscape architect, and teacher. The book also grows out of “Sensing Place: Photography as Inquiry,” the class I have taught at MIT for the past ten years.
