On Seeing is a new publication series devoted to visual literacy. Publications foreground the political agency, critical insight, and social impact inscribed in representation. Centering underrepresented perspectives and understudied questions, these books articulate complex ideas about how we see, comprehend, and participate in the visual world.
The MIT Press will publish each On Seeing volume as a print book, ebook, and open access digital edition created by Brown University Digital Publications.
The inaugural title in the On Seeing series is Mortevivum: Photography and the Politics of the Visual, a powerful examination of the unsettling history of photography and its fraught relationship to global antiblackness.
Black Elegies, the second volume in the On Seeing series, is an unflinching study of black grief as a form of elegy found in visual art, music, literature—everywhere, if you know how to see it.
