Why do we have such extraordinarily powerful responses toward the images and pictures we see in everyday life? Why do we behave as if pictures were alive, possessing the power to influence us, to demand things from us, to persuade us, seduce us, or even lead us astray? According to W. J. T. Mitchell, we need to reckon with images not just as inert objects that convey meaning but as animated beings with desires, needs, appetites, demands, and drives of their own. What Do Pictures Want? explores this idea and highlights Mitchell's innovative and profoundly influential thinking on picture theory and the lives and loves of images. Ranging across the visual arts, literature, and mass media, Mitchell applies characteristically brilliant and wry analyses to Byzantine icons and cyberpunk films, racial stereotypes and public monuments, ancient idols and modern clones, offensive images and found objects, American photography and aboriginal painting. Opening new vistas in iconology and the emergent field of visual culture, he also considers the importance of Dolly the Sheep—who, as a clone, fulfills the ancient dream of creating a living image—and the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11, which, among other things, signifies a new and virulent form of iconoclasm. What Do Pictures Want? offers an immensely rich and suggestive account of the interplay between the visible and the readable. A work by one of our leading theorists of visual representation, it will be a touchstone for art historians, literary critics, anthropologists, and philosophers alike. “A treasury of episodes—generally overlooked by art history and visual studies—that turn on images that ‘walk by themselves’ and exert their own power over the living.”—Norman Bryson, Artforum

Most of us suffer from images implying that we must look and act like movie stars to be sensuous. Movie, television, magazines, as well as our personal histories, shape these images and sensuality. But each of us is born with a natural sensuality that is still locked within us. Eidetic Imaging removes those layers of false images and unlocks our lush, natural sensuality.

The Sonoran Desert of the southwestern United States and northern Mexico sizzles in the sun. Daytime temperatures commonly soar above [actual symbol not reproducible]. The parched, mineral earth gets less than three inches of rainfall a year on average; some years, none at all. Plants of the region even drop their leaves to hold each precious drop of moisture. Yet this desert is one of the most fascinating and beautiful places in North America. A large variety of plants - creosote bush, the fabled boojum and numerous other cacti and succulents - flourish here, as do a wealth of birds, insects, and small mammals. Man is an uneasy resident, however, and although modern cities such as Phoenix and Tucson use artificial water supplies and air-conditioning to survive on its fringes, the natural heart of the desert still rejects all but the most intrepid sojourners. Two who know this desert well are Jack Dykinga and Charles Bowden. Each has confronted it on foot over the course of many years. Bowden, who now lives in Tucson, recently said, "I go to it like a thirsty animal goes to water. Something happens when you walk for a hundred miles in the desert and don't see a footprint. Once I turned around and saw someone else's footprint and it really shook me up. Then I realized it was my own." No casual visitor, Bowden expresses his feelings and experiences in words. He looks not only down at his own footprints, but also back in the historical record - to the Spanish conquistador Cabeza de Vaca, to an eighteenth-century Jesuit priest who cast for souls for seventeen years in Baja California. He recalls a Sand Papago Indian shaman who knows the desert like a medicine chest and plans to live forever; and he affectionately remembers both the madness and the sanity of his late friend, desert lover, and fellow pleader for preservation, Edward Abbey. Dykinga recaptures for us the way the desert looks and feels in exquisite color photographs. He has walked and sweated and camped the length and breadth of this place and brought back hundreds of brilliant large-format camera views. More than 120 are preserved here - most never before published. Interwoven together, the personal visions of these two remarkable observers evoke the Sonoran Desert with extraordinary power. We may or may not wish to be in the desert as they have been, but in these pages we will come as close as it is possible to being there.

Drawing upon both contemporary visual and written sources, this book illuminates the role that fashion plays in reflecting and shaping attitudes toward display and adornment. As traditional cultural notions of what is admissible or acceptable have fragmented, fashion has been a key site for experimentation. At both the haute couture and street level, clothing enables identities to be visualized, confronting the spectator with contradictory messages embodying the confusion of the time.Rebecca Arnold focuses on the last thirty years and places the desires and anxieties that surround fashion in their historical context. She highlights four key themes: -- Status, Power, and Display (the flaunting of wealth, the alienating power structures of good taste), -- Violence and Provocation (the rising tide of aggression in both fashion imagery and street styles), -- The Eroticized Body (the power of sex and display and the pressure to conform to ideals), and -- Gender and Subversion (the blurring of identity to disguise and confuse).This richly illustrated book always keeps its focus on the historical and ethical potential and possibilities that modern fashion embodies.

This is the most complete and compelling account of idols and celebrity in Japanese media culture to date. Engaging with the study of media, gender and celebrity, and sensitive to history and the contemporary scene, these interdisciplinary essays cover male and female idols, production and consumption, industrial structures and fan movements.

In the 1970s, Kelly's transgressive projects helped to instigate conceptual art's second phase; her daring critiques of the female body as a fetishized, allegorized, commodified site were debated long after they were first seen in galleries and discussed in catalogues, and long before the debut of the "bad girls" in the 1990s. In fact, the debates currently surrounding Kelly's work are a necessary and defining element of theoretical discourse about art today.

Technology and Desire argues that innovations in digital media technology are behind a growing shift toward digitally enhanced realism in the arts and, in particular, the art of the moving image. It provides insights into the rapidly expanding field of film and media studies, and presents a philosophy of new technology in the arts.

Desire in L.A. confronts limitless longing in a city that is itself without limits. In these poems, the object of desire is decidedly missing, whether that object be love or beauty or the past. Shifting even within a single poem, and certainly from section to section, the objects of desire in Martha Ronk's poetry become as elusive as the unnamed Marilyn Monroe--"that image of another's skirts"--of the title poem, or the moment captured in "A photograph as good as a picture": "He leans forward with such / fervor, yet isn't young and something / decidedly is happening, even / to the beefy fellow in his white / short-sleeved shirt. A photograph-- / oh, perhaps not the same as a / Manet, but it is Auden, and / for whatever reason he stares at / the square flesh neckline / of her dress. He is forward / in his chair, rumpled about / the collar and everyone is wearing / black and white. It is the formal / occasion of how much he cares / to be there, Venice, 1951 / and how much I care to see him / no matter what for, longing / like that." Moving from thwarted examples of family and place to language and its corruptions, from classical Japanese love poems to failed love in the southwestern desert, from emotionality to artifice, the book ends with a series focused on the slipperiness of all categories.

Images increasingly saturate our world, making present to us what is distant or obscure. Yet the power of images also arises from what they do not make present—from a type of absence they do not dispel. Joining a growing multidisciplinary conversation that rejects an understanding of images as lifeless objects, this book offers a theological meditation on the ways images convey presence into our world. Just as Christ negates himself in order to manifest the invisible God, images, Natalie Carnes contends, negate themselves to give more than they literally or materially are. Her Christological reflections bring iconoclasm and iconophilia into productive relation, suggesting that they need not oppose one another. Investigating such images as the biblical golden calf and paintings of the Virgin Mary, Carnes explores how to distinguish between iconoclasms that maintain fidelity to their theological intentions and those that lead to visual temptation. Offering ecumenical reflections on issues that have long divided Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox traditions, Image and Presence provokes a fundamental reconsideration of images and of the global image crises of our time.