What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images

Essential for visual rhetoricians! Great writer, too.

In the chapter titled the same as the book title, in laying out the grounds for his innovative exposition on images and culture, Mitchell explains, "[Images] present not just a surface but a face [italicized] that faces the beholder." Elsewhere in this chapter, he remarks that images may not have the power attributed to them; which supposed power is seen as absolute and all-encompassing in postmodern culture. Not suggesting that images ave no power, Mitchell takes the position that "the problem is to refine and complicate and refine our estimate of their power and the way it works." The author allows that his perspective based on what pictures "want" rather than what they "do" can at first blush seem to anthropomorphize pictures or give them an aboriginal animistic nature. But Mitchell explains that he means this as metaphorical, conceptual, and theoretical; not literal as in animism or even symbolic as with icons. Mitchell's provisional approach thus corresponds to the provisional quality of postmodern culture to bring extraordinary illumination to this contemporary culture. Fantasy, multiple selves, and virtual reality are other terms used to express this provisional quality of postmodernism. Playfulness is another--and Mitchell's book, while sound literarily and with extensive learning and cogent though, exercises the principle that playfulness can take one farther in some cases. Whereas in postmodernism, play with its provisional, usually somewhat artificial attributes is a manner of avoiding commitment and engagement with fundamentals, with Mitchell it is a technique for coming to grips as much as possible with the elusive, ethereal nature of postmodernism. It is impossible to encompass or define postmodernism; whose primary attributes are contingency, continually changing imagery, and pseudo-events and provisional personas to play to the media. But Mitchell has managed to relate postmodernism's sprawling nature and what accounts for this.

Wonderful service...and book!

Uma das melhores obras do visual studies. É uma leitura valioso que abre espaço para reflexões importantes sobre a imagem enquanto um organismo provavelmente dotado de vida... Vale muito à leitura!

What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images; W J T MitchellIn the last of his trilogy on art interpretation Mitchell puts the viewer on the pictures side and reviews the way how people are looking at artwork