Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Identity and Modern Visual Culture: Textual Perspectives

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Imaging Identity

  • 512 Accesses

Abstract

As the title of W. J. T. Mitchell’s influential book What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (2005) suggests, images have demands on us. Conversely, we want things from images, and both sets of demands evolve within shifting image cultures. This chapter engages with the question of how the rapidly changing economies of vision that shape our everyday lives relate to the constitution of contemporary identities. Taking stock of a century of image theories and placing contemporary visual culture in a larger socio-historical context, it lays the theoretical groundwork for this book’s exploration of how words combine with images to constitute personal, national and cultural identities in a range of media. Overall, it argues that the flood of emerging image cultures in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries calls for a re-evaluation of the links between image and identity from textual and cultural perspectives.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 84.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    The hope for Mehdi’s return also resonates with the expected return of the Mahdi , the eschatological redeemer who is known as the twelfth or hidden Imam in Shi’a Islam, referred to several times in the graphic novel.

  2. 2.

    On the nexus of identity, visuality and contemporary surveillance culture, see André Jansson and Miyase Christensen’s edited collection Media, Surveillance and Identity: Social Perspectives (2014) and David Lyon’s The Culture of Surveillance: Watching as a Way of Life (2018).

  3. 3.

    In this context, it is no coincidence that the same chapter refers to the fate of Iranian-Canadian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi, who was arrested and killed after photographing events connected to the student protests in Tehran in 2003.

  4. 4.

    One need only think of the damaging impact Betty Mahmoody’s 1987 memoir Not Without My Daughter and the Hollywood film that adapted it had on the lives of countless Iranians around the world (Fotouhi 2015, 175–179).

References

  • Amir and Khalil. 2011. Zahra’s Paradise. New York: First Second.

    Google Scholar 

  • Azoulay, Ariella. 2008. The Civil Contract of Photography. New York: Zone Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2012. Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography. Trans. Louise Bethlehem. London: Verso.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bassett, Caroline. 2007. The Arc and the Machine: Narrative and New Media. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Baudelaire, Charles. (1863) 1970. The Painter of Modern Life. In The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, ed. and trans. Jonathan Mayne, 1–40. New York: Phaidon Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Baudry, Jean-Louis. (1970) 1974–1975. Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus. Trans. Alan Williams. Film Quarterly 28 (2): 39–47.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Berger, John. 1980. About Looking. New York: Vintage.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bevan Zlatar, Antoinina. 2017. Introduction. In What Is an Image in Medieval and Early Modern England? 11–15. Tübingen: Gunter Narr.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bissett, Jennifer. 2017, October 19. Creator of The Matrix Code Reveals Its Mysterious Origin. CNET (Website). CBS Interactive Inc. https://www.cnet.com/news/lego-ninjago-movie-simon-whiteley-matrix-code-creator/.

  • Buchinger, Matthias. 1724. Mathias Buchinger, a Phocomelic. London: Engraving After Self-Portrait.

    Google Scholar 

  • Conley, Tom. 1996. The Self–Made Map: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern France. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Crary, Jonathan. 1990. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cummings, E. E. (1958) 1973. l(a. In Complete Poems 1904–1962, ed. George J. Firmage, 713. New York: Liveright.

    Google Scholar 

  • Defoe, Daniel. 1719. The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. London: W. Taylor.

    Google Scholar 

  • Deleuze, Gilles. (1983) 1986. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. (1985) 1989. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Caleta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Elkins, James. 2011. Introduction. In What Is an Image? ed. James Elkins and Maya Naef, 1–18. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fischer, Olga, and Max Nänny, eds. 1999a. Form Miming Meaning: Iconicity in Language and Literature. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1999b. Introduction: Iconicity as a Creative Force in Language Use. In Form Miming Meaning: Iconicity in Language and Literature, xv–xxxvi. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • ———, eds. 2001. The Motivated Sign: Iconicity in Language and Literature 2. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

    Google Scholar 

  • Flusser, Vilém. (1985) 2011. Into the Universe of Technical Images. Trans. Nancy Ann Roth. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fotouhi, Sanaz. 2015. The Literature of the Iranian Diaspora: Meaning and Identity since the Islamic Revolution. London: I.B. Tauris.

    Google Scholar 

  • Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hariman, Robert, and John L. Lucaites. 2007. No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2016. The Public Image: Photography and Civic Spectatorship. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Heusser, Martin. 2011. So Many Selves: The ‘I’ as Indeterminate Multiplicity. In American Modernist Poets, ed. Harold Bloom, 219–239. New York: Bloom’s Literary Criticism.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hoelzl, Ingrid, and Rémi Marie. 2015. Softimage: Towards a New Theory of the Digital Image. Bristol: Intellect.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jansson, André, and Miyase Christensen, eds. 2014. Media, Surveillance and Identity: Social Perspectives. New York: Peter Lang.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lacan, Jacques. (1949) 2006. The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience. In Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink, 75–81. New York: Norton.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lyon, David. 2018. The Culture of Surveillance: Watching as a Way of Life. Cambridge: Polity Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Manovich, Lev. 2001. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mead, George Herbert. (1934) 1962. Mind, Self and Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist, ed. Charles W. Morris. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Meier, Franz. 2009. Photographic Wonderland: Intermediality and Identity in Lewis Carroll’s Alice Books. In Alice Beyond Wonderland: Essays for the Twenty-First Century, ed. Christopher Hollingsworth, 117–134. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Metz, Christian. 1977. The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. Trans. Celia Britton et al. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mirzoeff, Nicholas. 1999. An Introduction to Visual Culture. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2011. The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. Durham: Duke University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Mitchell, W. J. T. 1980. The Language of Images. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1986. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1994. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2005. What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Mulvey, Laura. (1975) 1988. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. In Feminism and Film Theory, ed. by Constance Penley, 57–68. New York: Routledge.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Nietzsche, Friedrich. (1873) 1979. On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense. In Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870s. Amherst: Humanity Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. (1878) 1996. Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Nolan, Christopher, dir. 2000. Memento. Culver City: Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment, 2001. DVD.

    Google Scholar 

  • Panofsky, Erwin. (1939) 1991. Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance. New York: Icon Editions.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. (1927) 2002. Perspective as Symbolic Form. New York: Zone Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pedri, Nancy, and Laurence Petit. 2013. Picturing the Language of Images. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

    Google Scholar 

  • Perkins Gilman, Charlotte. (1892) 1997. The Yellow Wallpaper. In “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Other Stories, 1–15. Mineola: Dover.

    Google Scholar 

  • Potter, Russell A. 2007. Arctic Spectacles: The Frozen North in Visual Culture, 1818–1875. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rancière, Jacques. 2007. The Future of the Image. Trans. Gregory Elliott. London: Verso.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2009. The Emancipated Spectator. Trans. Gregory Elliott. London: Verso.

    Google Scholar 

  • Russell, Deirdre. 2018. Narrative, Space and Autobiographical Film in the Digital Age: An Analysis of The Beaches of Agnès (2008). In Spatial Modernities: Geography, Narrative, Imaginaries, ed. Johannes Riquet and Elizabeth Kollmann, 208–223. London: Routledge.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Saltzman, Lisa, and Eric M. Rosenberg. 2006. Introduction. In Trauma and Visuality in Modernity, ix–xix. Hanover: Dartmouth College Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. 1986. The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century. Leamington Spa: Berg.

    Google Scholar 

  • Schwartz, Vanessa R., and Jeannene M. Przyblyski. 2004. Preface by the Editors. In The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader, xxi–xxiii. New York: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Shakespeare, William. (1608) 1997. Sonnet 18. In Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. by Katherine Duncan-Jones, 147. London: Arden Shakespeare.

    Google Scholar 

  • Simmel, Georg. (1903) 1950. The Metropolis and Mental Life. In The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. and trans. Kurt H. Wolff, 409–424. New York: The Free Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sontag, Susan. 1973. On Photography. New York: Picador.

    Google Scholar 

  • Suess, Barbara A. 2003. The Writing’s on the Wall: Symbolic Orders in “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Women’s Studies 32: 79–97.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Taylor, Mark C., and Esa Saarinen. 1994. Imagologies: Media Philosophy. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Thompson, John B. 1995. The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Media. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Trifonova, Temenuga. 2003. Matter-Image or Image-Consciousness: Bergson Contra Sartre. Janus Head 6 (1): 80–114.

    Google Scholar 

  • Volz, Jessica A. 2017. Visuality in the Novels of Austen, Radcliffe, Edgeworth and Burney. London: Anthem Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wachowski, Lana, and Lilly Wachowski, dirs. 1999. The Matrix. Burbank: Warner Home Video, 2001. DVD.

    Google Scholar 

  • Watt, Ian. (1957) 2001. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. Berkeley: University of California Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • West, Shearer. 2004. Portraiture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Williams, Raymond. 1983. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Rev. ed. New York: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Tampere University, Tampere, Finland

    Johannes Riquet

  2. University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Martin Heusser

Authors
  1. Johannes Riquet
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Martin Heusser
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Johannes Riquet .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Tampere University, Tampere, Finland

    Johannes Riquet

  2. University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Martin Heusser

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2019 The Author(s)

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Riquet, J., Heusser, M. (2019). Identity and Modern Visual Culture: Textual Perspectives. In: Riquet, J., Heusser, M. (eds) Imaging Identity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21774-7_1

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation