A major work by Risaku Suzuki made of 58 pictures of places where worked painters who, strongly stimulated by the birth of photography in the nineteenth century, searched in response for a new kind of painting, among them Cezanne and Monet. Travelling through France to the places they painted, he wanted to experience the landscape, the weather, the changes of light and the direction of the wind, and to think about what the painters felt and sought there, rather than about their viewpoints or the present state of the places. The new medium let people hold the world still, and Degas, Monet and Cezanne sought to link the act of painting directly to seeing, to capture the moments that unfold before the eyes. The mechanical perception of the camera takes place outside the body and produces images with a clarity unaffected by memory; the title is a phrase of Cezanne's, and the book sets Suzuki's own pursuit of the purity of perception, from the early rangefinder series to the large-format camera, beside the questions that painters asked about what painting is.