Sunil Manghani, Arthur Piper, and Jon Simons, eds. Images: A Reader . London: SAGE, 2006. 331 Pages. ISBN: 1412900441.

Images: A Reader, an anthology edited by Sunil Manghani, Arthur Piper, and Jon Simons, presents a focused reevaluation of how images are conceived and framed as objects of study. The anthology strives to consider the image in its many contexts, histories, and senses—that is, in both concrete, pictorial ways as well as non-material manifestations—but not to prescribe definitions. Rather, the editors have set out to provide a foundational and wide-ranging collection of the most significant texts relating to the complex term, an endeavor that suggests possibilities for interpretation while making no attempt to impel particular trends upon a reader. Ultimately, the editors intend Images to beget a field of “image studies,” a project that aims to provide a broad and inclusive framework within which an examination of the nature and influence of the image in contemporary culture can occur.

Much like Nicholas Mirzoeff's influential The Visual Culture Reader , which made the claim for the necessity of visual culture as a field of study based on the “newly visual existence” of postmodern culture,¹ the editors of Images call for the establishment of image studies based on a now clichéd assumption: citing a “bombardment” of images in the media and urban landscapes of the twenty-first century, the anthology is motivated by an effort “to provide an aid for making sense of contemporary image culture in the West” (1). Unlike Mirzoeff, however, who casually employs the word “image” to describe various facets of visual culture, Manghani, Piper, and Simons construct Images with the conception of an “image culture”—a view of culture based on a multifaceted notion of the image itself. The editors are careful in delimiting their project: rather than suggesting that images be an object of study, they set out to examine the “different types of objects of study that various disciplines and perspectives make of images” in an attempt to “array the discursive apparatus required for the study of images” (1). To this end, the texts assembled in Images provide a thorough and inclusive representation of the interdisciplinary nature of the field.

Images is divided into three parts, and each is then subdivided into separate sections that are thirteen in sum. In the first part, “Historical and Philosophical Precedents,” the editors have chosen a number of texts that exemplify how and where images first appeared in the foundational texts of Western intellectual thought, beginning with Biblical passages and the major Greek philosophers then proceeding well into the nineteenth century to the works of Kant, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud.

Such an historical foundation leads well into the second part, “Theories of Images,” which features twentieth-century developments in the conceptualization of images. Here, the editors have created subsections based on the themes of ideology critique, art history, semiotics, phenomenology, and psychoanalysis. While the anthology includes the key texts on which each school of thought rests (phenomenology, for example, begins with Martin Heidegger, and semiotics with Ferdinand de Saussure), the editors have also chosen to feature the work of contemporary intellectuals—an important and noteworthy effort that illustrates the evolution of the so-called image studies in each field.

“Image Culture,” the third and final part of the book, presents the more recent discussions surrounding images, including “images and words,” “image as thought,” “fabrication” (the creation and manipulation of images), “visual culture,” “vision and visuality,” and “image studies.” In these sections, the editors lay the groundwork for a field of image studies by summarizing what are to them the most important contemporary debates and highlighting the intellectuals whose work constitutes the field.

The editors make two particularly useful contributions to the anthology. At the outset of each section, an introduction effectively summarizes and presents key issues for that section's readings, relates dominant themes to those earlier or later in the anthology, and outlines the significance of the individual excerpts in terms of the editors' proposed field of image studies. Aware of the bias with which they may have compiled the volume, however, the editors also have chosen to include four alternative tables of contents that fall at the end of the book's general introduction. Broad categorical headings—“theoretical approaches to the analysis of images,” “disciplines dealing with images,” “types of images,” and “issues and debates in image studies”—provide readers with alternative ways of utilizing the readings and encourage multiple and varied readings of the collection. Accessible and well-organized, these alternative tables go far in exemplifying the extent to which the editors wish to open up the field of inquiry in the study of images.

In selecting and editing the texts for Images , however, the editors convey a paradoxical set of intentions. Each text has been drastically abridged (for example, the entry for Walter Benjamin's The Dialectical Image condenses the twenty page essay into ten short paragraphs spanning just two pages) and most original footnotes have been deleted in a deliberate attempt to “include more selections” (17). Yet the entire work limits itself to Western conceptions of and intellectual approaches to images. The main inclusion of an “Eastern image culture” is a short essay (including images, just over three pages) by Ernest Fenollosa on Chinese characters titled The Roots of Poetry . The editors acknowledge this limitation by contending that the complexity of image culture could not be contained in a single volume, but their editing conventions suggest that their efforts could have yielded a more inclusive result.

Nevertheless, as a sort of “primer” for an interdisciplinary consideration of images, Images: A Reader is a noteworthy and accessible contribution to the continually evolving field of cultural critique, and is a useful tool for students and scholars alike. Despite the editors' debatable success in demarcating a new field of “image studies,” the anthology represents a worthwhile effort to innovatively relate and interpret many of the foundational and contemporary texts of Western intellectual thought. While providing “a representative but not exhaustive range of the historical contexts, institutionalized discourses, theoretical approaches and debates that are pertinent to the study of images” (3), the anthology may not argue for particular definitions of the “image” or “image culture,” but the selection and arrangement of texts implicitly critiques the nature of current considerations of images and visual culture. By conceiving of an “image culture” and an “image studies” that is characterized by both historical and contemporary contexts, Images: A Reader tacitly supersedes the notion that ours is a uniquely “visual” culture, suggesting instead that the study of images is necessary due to the longevity and permanence of images throughout the history of human experience.