What Is an Image?

“What Is an Image? offers a richly informative, wide-ranging, and open-ended ensemble of ideas and viewpoints that significantly advances the scholarly conversation. One of the great virtues of the volume is that it breaks with the standardized format of much academic writing to allow the coexistence of a plurality of voices and opinions. The reader is allowed to ‘listen in’ on a discussion that takes place at the cutting edge of current research and thereby gains a clear overview of the issues at stake in reconceptualizing the image.” —Jason Gaiger, The University of Oxford

“What Is an Image? is bursting with incisive debate and suggestive commentary about the nature, diversity, and peculiarity of images, ranging from brief remarks to focused critiques to a sustained analytic afterword. In navigating the thicket of past and contemporary image theory, it juxtaposes an astonishing range of views—sometimes compatible, sometimes contradictory, always distinctive. But it never loses sight of core concerns, and it productively reopens and reorients some of the most challenging questions about our reception and representation of the visible world.” —Whitney Davis, University of California at Berkeley