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Overview
Images: A Reader provides a key resource for students, academics, practitioners and other readers engaged in the critical, theoretical, and practical study of images. The Reader is concerned with the notion of the ‘image’ in all its theoretical, critical and practical contexts, uses and history. It provides a map of the differences and similarities between the various disciplinary approaches to images, breaking the ground for a new interdisciplinary study of images, in the arts and humanities and beyond. The selection of over 80 key readings, across the domains of philosophy, art, literature, science, critical theory and cultural studies tells the story of images through intellectual history from the Bible to the present. By including both well-established writings and more recent, innovative research, the Reader outlines crucial developments in contemporary discourses about images.
Synopsis
If contemporary culture is an image culture, how should we understand and analyze the vast range of images among which we live?
Images: A Reader provides a key resource for students, academics, practitioners and other readers engaged in the critical, theoretical and practical study of images. The Reader is concerned with the notion of the 'image' in all its theoretical, critical and practical contexts, uses and history. It provides a map of the differences and similarities between the various disciplinary approaches to images, breaking the ground for a new interdisciplinary study of images, in the arts and humanities and beyond.
Images: A Reader is divided into three parts:
- Historical and Philosophical Precedents sets the background for contemporary debates about images
- Theories of Images provides key texts of the major approaches through which images are conceptualized
- Image Culture introduces some of the more recent debates about images and today's visual environment
The selection of over 80 key readings, across the domains of philosophy, art, literature, science, critical theory and cultural studies tells the story of images through intellectual history from the Bible to the present. By including both well-established writings and more recent, innovative research, the Reader outlines crucial developments in contemporary discourses about images.
Editorials
From the Publisher
This is just what visual studies needs: a sober, analytic, parsimonious selection of crucial textsJames Elkins Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism School of the Art Institute of Chicago
The sheer breadth of this collection - from Genesis to Hockney and Plato to Lacan- shows how much images have always been a part of our culture. This volume makes a welcome contribution to our (re)discovery of the visual in society and how much we stand to learn from it, past and present
Richard Howells King's College, London
There are many fine anthologies on visual culture, yet none that offer such a concise and comprehensive array of the theoretical perspectives defining this interdisciplinary field
Robert Hariman Northwestern University
An indispensible resource for image analysis. The best thing I have seen in this field by a long way
Valerie Walkerdine Professor of Psychology, School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University
The editors make two particularly useful contributions to the anthology. At the outset of each section, an introduction effectively summarizes and presents key issues for that section's readings, relates dominant themes to those earlier or later in the anthology, and outlines the significance of the individual excerpts in terms of the editors' proposed field of image studies. Aware of the bias with which they may have compiled the volume, however, the editors also have chosen to include four alternative tables of contents that fall at the end of the book's general introduction ... Accessible and well-organized, these alternative tables go far in exemplifying the extent to which the editors wish to open up the field of inquiry in the study of images
Mark Andrews Invisible Culture
A rich, well-considered volume that is bound to become a critical introductory text for students of images and images studies everywhere, as well as an essential resource for academics and practitioners alike. This reader is an invaluable tool for those interested in images and image studies across a vast array of disciplines
Zoë Sadokierski Visual Communications
Much theorizing in visual studies, visual anthropology, and visual culture is offered in an a-historical vein, sliding along secondary and tertiary conceptual trajectories, with little sense of interdisciplinary origin. This book recovers the historical grounds of the study of 'images' and provides and contextualizes most of the defining texts, and a lot more besides. A cursory flipping through visual anthropology textbooks will reveal that few cite any of the authors included here... One could question the choice of works to reprint in the compilation: one could, with one or two exceptions, discuss the white, Western-centric emphasis of the anthology, and one could query others things besides. For the most part this would be pointless, as the tome offers a comprehensive overview. I can’t do any better than repeating Martin Jay’s blurb on the back cover: "Images, from time immemorial, have generated words, words to describe them, words to interpret them, words to enhance or keep their magic at bay. Many of the most eloquent and insightful of these words, from the Bible to Plato, to contemporary visual culture studies, are gathered together in this remarkable collection, which is surely destined to be a standard reference in its field for many years to come”
Keyan G. Tomaselli Visual Anthropology