What Is an Image?

Contents

Series Preface

Introduction

James Elkins

The Seminars

1 How Many Theories of Images Are There?

2 What Is Outside Images

3 Accounts of Images, and Accounts That Begin from Images

4 Ontology

5 Non-Western Accounts

6 Public and Private

7 Religion, Ritual, the Sacred

8 Painting and Images

9 Image, Notation, Graph . . .

Assessments

Preface

James Elkins

Frederick M. Asher

Michael Ann Holly

Adrian Rifkin

Frank Vigneron

Keith Moxey

Harry Cooper

Parul Dave Mukherji

Thomas Baumeister

Vivian Sobchack

Alex Potts

Kavita Singh

Paul Messaris

Emmanuel Alloa

Aud Sissel Hoel

Ellen Chow

Xaq Pitkow

Crispin Sartwell

Klaus Speidel

Antonia Pocock

Paul Willemarck

Ruth Sonderegger

Thomas Macho and Jasmin Mersmann

Ciarán Benson

Christoph Lüthy

Sebastian Egenhofer

Irmgard Emmelhainz

Ladislav Kesner

John Michael Krois

Karin Leonhard

Francesco Peri

Frederik Stjernfelt

Rainer Totzke

Michael Zimmermann

Sunil Manghani

Klaus Sachs-Hombach

José Luis Brea

Afterword

Wolfram Pichler

Notes on the Contributors

Index

“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