Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, The Lives of Images: Repetition, Reproduction and Circulation, 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 1 of the series, Repetition, Reproduction, and Circulation, addresses the multiple life cycles of the image—its modes of dispersion, reception, consumption, and aggregation—and the significance of technological reproduction for contemporary forms of social, cultural, and political life. The image is considered as both a tool for liberation and a means of repression within the evolving structures of modern life.

The essays consider the implications of the nature and effect of the reproducible image on the categories, shapes, and aims of contemporary art and society. Further grounded by two interviews with practitioners in the field, Repetition, Reproduction, and Circulation promises to be an accessible, rigorous, and timely resource for all students, educators, and practitioners of photography.