Images: Reader, A

Description:
'This is just what visual studies needs: a sober, analytic, parsimonious selection of crucial texts' - James 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 If contemporary culture is an image culture, how should we understand and analyse 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. The Reader 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 conceptualised. ' 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.

Review:
This is just what visual studies needs: a sober, analytic, parsimonious selection of crucial texts James Elkins Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism School of the Art Institute of Chicago

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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 Zoe Sadokierski Visual Communications

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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 'Images; A Reader is a key resource for academics and others studying images and their interpretation. College-level collections, whether art history holdings or cultural studies collections, will find it intriguing.' -- James A. Cox 20070601

Table of Contents:
Part One: Historical and Philosophical Precedents Genesis to Locke Man Created in God's Image Graven Images - Genesis 2: 26 and 27 Abraham and the Idol Shop of his Father Terah - Exodus 20: 4-6 The Simile of the Cave - Midrash Rabbah Art and Illusion - Plato The Origins of Imitation - Plato Thinking with Images - Aristotle Iconodules and Iconoclasts in Byzantium - Aristotle John of Damascus Horos at Nicaea, 787 A.D. Horos at Niera, 754 A.D. Image and Idolatry Evil Demon - Thomas Hobbes Images and the Brain - Rene Descartes Of Ideas - Rene Descartes Kant to Freud - John Locke Representation and Imagination Space and Time - Immanuel Kant Camera Obscura - Gotthold Lessing The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof - Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels How the Real World at Last Became a Myth - Karl Marx On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense - Friedrich Nietzsche Images, Bodies and Consciousness - Friedrich Nietzsche The Dream-Work - Henri Bergson Part Two: Theories of Images - Sigmund Freud Ideology Critique Television: Multilayered Structure Society of the Spectacle - Theodor Adorno The Precession of Simulacra - Guy Debord Image as Commodity - Jean Baudrillard 'Race' and Nation - Fredric Jameson Never Just Pictures - Paul Gilroy Art History - Susan Bordo Studies in Iconology Invention and Discovery - Erwin Panofsky Interpretation without Representation, or, The Viewing of Las Meninas - Ernst Gombrich Towards a Visual Critical Theory - Svetlana Alpers Semiotics - Susan Buck-Morss Nature of the Linguistic Sign The Sign: Icon, Index, and Symbol - Ferdinand de Saussure The Third Meaning - Charles Sanders Peirce From Sub- to Suprasemiotic: The Sign as Event - Roland Barthes The Semiotic Landscape - Mieke Bal Phenomenology - Gunter Kress and Theo van Leeuwen Thing and Work Eye and Mind - Martin Heidegger Description - Maurice Merleau-Ponty Imagination - Jean-Paul Sartre Scientific Visualism - Mikel Dufrenne Psychoanalysis - Don Ihde The Gaze / Anamorphosis The All-Perceiving Subject - Jacques Lacan Woman as Image (Man as Bearer of the Look) - Christian Metz Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills - Laura Mulvey Two Kinds of Attention - Joan Copjec Part Three: Image Culture - Anton Ehrenzweig Images and Words The Roots of Poetry Icon and Image - Ernest Fenollosa This is Not a Pipe - Paul Ricoeur The Despotic Eye and its Shadow: Media Image in the Age of Literacy - Michel Foucault Images, Audiences, and Readings - Robert Romanyshyn Image as Thought - Kevin DeLuca Pictures and Facts Body Images - Ludwig Wittgenstein Involuntary Memory - Antonio Damasio The Philosophical Imaginary - Marcel Proust Thought and Cinema: The Time-Image - Michele Le Doeuff The Dialectical Image - Gilles Deleuze Ways of Remembering - Walter Benjamin Fabrication - John Berger Taking a Line for a Walk On Montage and the Filmic Fourth Dimension - Paul Klee Electronic Tools - Sergei Eisenstein Camera Lucida - William J. Mitchell Images Scatter into Data, Data Gather into Images - David Hockney Visual Culture - Peter Galison The Medium is the Message The Image of the City - Marshal McLuhan The Image-World - Kevin Lynch The Philosopher as Andy Warhol - Susan Sontag Symbol, Idol and Murti: Hindu God-images and the Politics of Mediation - Arthur Danto The United Colors of Diversity - Gregory Price Grieve The Unbearable Lightness Of Sight - Celia Lury Vision and Visuality - Meiling Cheng Modernising Vision The Im/Pulse to See - Jonathan Crary Lighting for Whiteness - Rosalind Krauss Cultural Relativism and the Visual Turn - Richard Dyer The Modularity of Vision - Martin Jay Image Studies - Semir Zeki The Family of Images The Domain of Images - W.J.T. Mitchell A C