Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, The Lives of Images: Analogy, Attunement and Attention, 2021

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 wider set of cultural practices. The series tracks the many movements and “lives” of images—their tendency to accumulate, circulate, and transform through different geographies, cultures, processes, institutions, states, uses, and times.

Volume 2 in this series, Analogy, Attunement, and Attention, addresses the complex relationships that the reproducible image creates with its viewers, their bodies, their minds, and their sense of the physical and metaphysical world. The selection addresses the image’s role in the social constitution of individual and collective identity, in social practices of resistance to the structural violences of racism, or in relation to state exercises of power. Of particular importance in this volume are questions of our changing relationship to space and to selfhood as mediated by the image and by the many networked technologies and norms built around it. Essays in the volume ask: what modes of attention are required of us as viewers and agents of image circulation? The question of how image technologies provide us with an array of freedoms is here combined with and read against the many ways images are deployed to reorient, repress, or reduce our field of vision—thus affecting our capacity to see and to act in social space.