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.
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 - René Descartes
Of Ideas - René 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 - Michèle 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 Constructivist Manifesto - James Elkins
Images, Not Signs - Barbara Stafford
What is Iconoclash? Or is there a World Beyond the Image Wars? - Régis Debray
