Ford, vision, and media

This essay discusses Ford’s engagement with vision and visual media of various kinds (especially painting and proto-cinematic devices) through his career as an art critic, novelist, poet and essay writer. The first aim it to convey a wide, informed and analytic canvas of this vast production (thirty-four works are considered, in order to abstract major tendencies in his developing interest in the visual), while overviewing, systematising and making sense of existing Ford scholarship on the subject. The second aim is to identify, analyse and offer new insights into major thematic strands — both well-known lines of enquiry, such as Ford’s relationship with the Old Masters, the Pre-Raphaelites and the avant-gardes, and largely neglected areas, such as the relationship between the visual field and emotion (e.g. through trauma, surveillance and care), the exchanges between the visible and the invisible, mental imagery and the phenomenology of reading, the afterlives of Ford’s works in contemporary media. The third and final aim is to suggest new directions and methodological approaches, from cognitivism to affect theory, which could be fruitfully applied to Ford studies on this topic.