The Lives of Images, Vol. II: Analogy, Attunement, and Attention

The Lives of Images, edited by Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, is a set of contemporary thematic readers designed for educators, students, practicing photographers, and others interested in the ways images function within a wide set of cultural practices.

Volume II of this series, Analogy, Attunement, and Attention brings together a uniquely contemporary and diverse set of voices to address the complex sets of relationships that the photograph creates between its viewers and their bodies, minds, and sense of the physical and metaphysical world. This selection of essays addresses the historical trajectory of theories of the image, from late-eighteenth-century “proto-photograph” to the wake of television’s invention and the present moment of socially mediated Internet art. Analogy, Attunement, and Attention examines our changing relationship to space and selfhood as mediated by the lens, the print, the screen, the computer, and the multitude of networked technologies built around the image. In this accessible and timely reader, the question of how image technologies provide us with an array of freedoms is combined with and read against incisive critiques of how image technologies register, reorient, repress, or reduce our field of vision, and thus affect our ability or willingness to act in social space.