Annotation: Empire of Light is the name of a painting by the Belgian surrealist Rene Magritte. Under a daytime sky dotted with white clouds we see a street at night – a house with glowing windows, a lamp in front of the house giving off rays of light, and the dark silhouettes of trees. One might say that this picture is a detailed metaphor of vision, and in the case of photography this metaphor is applicable in a much more systematic fashion. Oksana Gavrishina's book is devoted to the diverse forms of photographic 'vision', which is historically determined and can be discerned within photographs themselves, rather than in their accompanying texts. Gavrishina analyzes works by Russian, Lithuanian and American photographers, and the theoretical and chronological framework of her research is the age of "Modernity," beginning in the 1930s. The book tracks the formation of the artistic canon in photography in the early 20th century, in avant-garde art. How was photography perceived, how was it evaluated in the context of art theory, and how was the understanding of 'semblance' intertwined with the reflections imprinted in a photograph? Gavrishina seeks answers to these questions in her book.