Description: 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.
Review Quotes: 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.--Keyan G. Tomaselli