Leja Image

Scenes from a History of the Image
Author(s): Michael Leja

Source: Social Research, Vol. 78, No. 4, The Image (WINTER 2011), pp. 999-1028
Published by: The New School
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Michael Leja
Scenes from a History of
the Image
A HISTORY OF THE IMAGE SHOULD BEGIN BY ACKNOWLEDGING
that the term forces a convergence of three fundamental human

activities: seeing, thinking, and depicting. Images frequently have
been understood to be the currency of all three, so a comprehensive
history would have to venture into many of the disciplines that bear
on these activities—optics, theories of vision, history of art, philoso
phy, psychology, biology, cognitive science, religion, and on and on.
Not much would be excluded, so it comes as no surprise to learn that
such a history does not exist.1 Another daunting requirement of this
history is that it integrates features of images that are relatively invari
ant across time with historically contingent ones. Both are essential to
the story. Choosing an appropriate medium for this history would pres
ent a third challenge. "Image" is a word that designates a category of
nonwords; perhaps a completely nonverbal history of the image would
be its purest form? Attractive as this fantasy might be, a purely pictorial
history of the image is no easier to imagine than a nonvisual history of
the word. A viable history of the image will comprise word and image
locked in complex and paradoxical relations.
What follows is something much more limited: a largely verbal
collection of significant episodes that indicate something of the range
a full history of the image would require. It seeks also to demonstrate
that particularized concepts of the image are invaluable for correlat
ing models of seeing, thinking, and picturing in specific times and
places.
social research Vol. 78 : No. 4 : Winter 2011 999
miUUHlU WlilUlV^H VHHH v\v
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Figure 1: Albrecht Durer, The Temptation of Saint Anthony, from the Prayer
Book of Maximilian, 1515, Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek.
MENTAL PICTURE
In Aristotle's philosophy of mind, images are the medium of thought.
To the thinking soul images [phantasmata] serve as if they

were contents of perception (and when it asserts or denies
them to be good or bad it avoids or pursues them). That is
why the soul never thinks without an image [Sjometimes
by means of the images or thoughts which are within the
soul, just as if it were seeing, [the faculty of thinking] calcu
lates and deliberates what is to come by reference to what
is present. ... No one can learn or understand anything in
the absence of sense, and when the mind is actively aware
of anything it is necessarily aware of it along with an image;
for images are like sensuous contents except in that they
contain no matter (1930: Book 3, parts 7 and 8).2
Aristotle understands thinking to work much like seeing, except

that it entails images not emanating from visual sensation. These
1000 social research
thought-images are distinguishable from the products of ordinary
vision by being less substantial. The locus of thought is the imagination
(phantasia), where images generated by visual perception mix with
images conjured by memory or invention. The combination enables us
to envision the future and recall the past. Beyond perception, memory,
and invention, this model of the mind allows space also for appe
tites, fantasy, and desire, which likewise must be mediated by images.
Imagination for Aristotle is both deliberative and desirous, and since
desire may take the form of rational wish, sinful temptation, or irratio
nal passion, control over the mind's images becomes a pressing matter.
This issue of control became critical in Christian Europe during
the early modern period, when increased power and importance were
attributed to the imagination.
The imagination was no longer one among many auxiliary

powers of the soul, but one of the three or four dominant
ones that made up its operations. More than that, it became
the single mediator between the incorporeal soul and the
corporeal body. . . . While external sense was tied strictly
to the presence of objects and the task of reporting them,
imagination combined perception and reproduction with
the freer mental processes of constructing, combining, and
manipulating images (Clark 2007: 43-45).
This greater importance entailed greater moral and epistemological

pressure. Unreliable and fallible, the imagination could conjure false
or mistaken images as easily as truthful ones. False images might
intrude from the world outside as well as from within, and some could
be exceptionally dangerous. Writers from Saint Augustine to Saint

Thomas Aquinas warned especially about the power of demons to form
images in men's minds as a way of leading them to sinful behavior and
damnation.
In a drawing from 1515 (see figure 1), Albrecht Dürer pictured

externally induced visions as a matter of blowing an image into a
Scenes from a History of the Image 1001
person's head. The beautiful woman proffering a dish to the ascetic
Saint Anthony is a tempting delusion; we understand this once we
recognize that she has been conjured by the demonic figure working
a bellows behind the saint. Blowing the saint's mind, so to speak, the
demon injects it with a seductive image via a current of air (Cole 2002).
That viewers of Diirer's drawing also see the effects of the demon's
handiwork—the woman is rendered with the same substantiality as
everything else in the picture—suggests that we all are susceptible to
such externally infused images. This suggestion carries the risk that
viewers might align Dürer himself with the demon as a producer of
false images, but representations materialized in an artistic medium
(here ink on paper) are presumably less likely to be confused with the
airy images of mind. Portrayals of Saint Anthony's temptation were
numerous at this time, and the saint himself became a model for fend
ing off dangerous mental images through steadfast piety and fervent
devotion.
Other samts—Catherine or Gregory, for example—were associ

ated with the experience of holy visions, as opposed to unholy ones,
since God also blew unreal images before the mind's eye. He had two
ways of doing this, according to Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologica
(1274). God could intervene in the perception of an individual, whose
vision of an icon would be altered in such a way that it would appear
to be bleeding or weeping or moving. Or God could change the appear
ance of an artifact by altering its accidental qualities (as opposed to its
substance), so that many of the faithful over a period of time would
witness its miraculous character (Holmes 2011: 448). Nuns in late medi
eval Germany learned to cultivate holy visions through the use of draw
ings and texts (Hamburger 1997).
A very different approach to thinking about the mind as locus
and generator of images is developed in the work of art historian Ernst
Gombrich. In his classic study Art and Illusion, Gombrich undertakes to
"analyze afresh, in psychological terms, what is actually involved in the
process of image making and image reading" (1969: 25). Gombrich's
account of visual perception emphasizes the active role of the viewer,
who sees by projecting interpretations onto sensory stimuli. Despite
what artists may say and what conventional wisdom often holds, vision
and art begin not with visual impressions but with mental images.
Seeing and picturing depend on anticipations drawn from a ready
supply of conventionalized mental models—what Gombrich calls
"schemata"—formed from past experience. These schemata are the
starting point of vision and art; they govern how we see and how we
make representations of the world. They can be revised or "corrected"
when we recognize deviations from the stereotype in a specific sensoiy
stimulus or in a work of art. Artists depicting unfamiliar subjects take
a familiar schema and adapt it by changing certain distinctive features.
For Gombrich this "principle of the adapted stereotype," by which art
and vision operate through a process of schema and correction, explains
why art has a history and especially why illusionism takes the course it
does in European art from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century.
The history of art becomes data for the analysis of visual perception and
vice versa.
Gombrich illustrates his point using the example of British

artist John Constable, who spoke of being committed to the pursuit
of painting as a scientific inquiry into the laws of nature. He report
edly said to his biographer, "When I sit down to make a sketch from
nature, the first thing I try to do is forget that I have ever seen a
picture" (Leslie 1911: 246; cited in Gombrich 1969: 174). His numer
ous cloud studies, many of which are preserved at the Victoria and
Albert Museum in London, often appear to be utterly fresh and uncon
strained records of visual experience. However, Gombrich calls our
attention to a series of painstaking copies Constable made of cloud
sketches drawn by an earlier painter/naturalist, Alexander Cozens.
They demonstrate, Gombrich argues, that art committed to replicat
ing visual appearances can only proceed from established paradigms,
internalized as mental images and templates, which form a basis for
comparison with particular cases and may be adjusted or corrected.3
Seeing and depicting are homologous in their dependence on mental
images as starting points.
FLOATING SKIN
Writing some three centuries after Aristotle in Rome, the atomist

Lucretius outlined a very different concept of the image in his De verum
natura:
... images, filmy presentments of objects,

Are from their surfaces shot.
These films reside on the surface
Forming a kind of skin or rmd, inasmuch as such image

In its appearance and form exactly resembles the object
From the substance whereof it is shed and commences its
journey... (Lucretius 1950: 124).
By this view, all things in the world constantly throw off from
their surfaces "unsubstantial self-representations," extremely thin
skins or membranes, merely one atom thick, which move impercep
tibly through the air in all directions until they "strike the eyes and
stimulate vision," which registers them as images.
... tenuous tissues, thin pictures of objects,

Flow away from their surface in never-ending procession.
Thus there are countless facsimile images shed in a twin
kling. .. (128).
Lucretius finds analogies for this model in highly diffused

emanations, "like wood smoke and heat from the fire," as well as in
more condensed variations, "such as the delicate sheaths which grass
hoppers shed in the summer, / don' Also the cauls which newly born
calves discard from their bodies, / Also the slough which the slippeiy
snake suspends 'mongst the thorns. . . Such phenomena give reason
to believe, he asserts, "that a thin replica must proceed from the surface
of objects" (125).
This model of the image is riddled with questions. How do these
floating material simulacra pass through one another without distor
tion? Why don't objects lose mass after exuding atoms for a very long
time? How is it that the skins shrink as they approach an eye, achieving
eyeball size just at the appropriate moment? (Lindberg 1976: 58-59)
And yet, the idea remained influential into the nineteenth century,
when it was mobilized in explanations for the new and disorienting
images produced through photography. Honoré de Balzac evidently
was among those subscribing to this belief. The narrator of his novel Le
Cousin Pons (1847) says that "what Daguerre has proven by his discovery
is precisely this ... that a building or a man is incessantly and continu
ously represented by an image in the atmosphere, that every existing
object has a distinct and perceptible specter there. . . " (Balzac 1900:
146; author's translation; cited in Gunning 1995: 43). That this was
evidently Balzac's own view is attested by his friend, the photographer
Nadar, who noted the novelist's "uneasiness about the daguerreotype
process."
According to Balzac's theory, all physical bodies are

made up entirely of layers of ghostlike images, an infi
nite number of leaflike skins laid one on top of the other.
Since Balzac believed man was incapable of making some
thing material from an apparition, from something impal
pable—that is, creating something from nothing—he
concluded that every time someone had his photograph
taken, one of the spectral layers was removed from the
body and transferred to the photograph. Repeated expo
sures entailed the unavoidable loss of subsequent ghostly
layers, that is, the very essence of life (Nadar 1978: 9; cited
in Gunning 1995: 43).
Nadar joked that this belief did not prevent Balzac from having
his photograph taken; his "ample proportions allowed him to squan
der his layers without a thought." According to Nadar, two of Balzac's
friends, Théophile Gautier and Gérard de Nerval (nom de plume of
Gérard Labrunie) shared these beliefs. Confronted with photography's
Figure 2: Engraving from René Descartes, La Dioptrique, 1637. Photograph
courtesy the Library of the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts;
David A. Hanson Collection of the History of Photomechanical
Reproduction (photograph by Michael Agee).
startling ability to produce uncanny simulacra of its subjects, intelli
gent people desiring a materialist explanation evidently found convinc
ing answers in Lucretius's model of the image.
RETINAL PROJECTION
A version of the image based on the projected geometry of the world

as it meets the eye was developed in the work of a long line of visual
theorists, including Euclid, Ptolemy, Ibn al-Haytham, Leonardo da
Vinci, Kepler, and Descartes. In its most influential form, this model
construes the image to be the configuration of light rays that takes
form on the retina, which lies along the inside wall at the back of
the eyeball. Johannes Kepler was the first to call the inverted retinal
image "pictura," which, according to historian David Lindberg, "is the
first genuine instance in the history of visual theory of a real optical
image within the eye—a picture, having an existence independent of
the observer, formed by the focusing of all available rays on a surface"
(Lindberg 1976: 202). This model posits a precise physical correspon
dence, grounded in the regular and predictable characteristics of light
rays, between the structure of the world and visual perception. The
retina becomes a physiological screen that homogenizes all things
seen. This view underpinned the work of generations of Western artists
committed to accurate transcription of the world.
Implicit in this model is an analogy between the structure of the
eye and a camera obscura, which Leonardo da Vinci was among the first
to draw. He stopped short of equating the retina with the screen at the
back of the camera obscura as the seat of the image, as Johannes Kepler
did. Later, René Descartes in his La Dioptrique (1637) would replace the
lens of the camera obscura "with the eye of a newly dead person or,
failing that, the eye of an ox or some other large animal" to study the
retinal image (1985 [1637]: 166). This experiment was pictured in his
text (see figure 2). The illustration shows an observer studying at close
range an eyeball whose outer layers along the back wall have been cut
away to reveal the image nestled in the retina. That image is formed by
light rays entering the eye from three different points; each visual cone
passes through a series of refractive agents (cornea, lens, humors) that
invert the rays and form a new cone focused at the retina.
This model of the retinal image developed in concert with the
geometry of linear perspective, both of which are rooted in Euclid's analy
sis of the visual field. At times the making of art and the analysis of vision
cross-fertilized one another. Dtirer's use of a string attached to a fixed
point to make perspectivally accurate renderings of objects in space may
have inspired Kepler to use the same technique to work out a geometry
of radiation through apertures (Lindberg 1976: 186-187). Painters such
as Masaccio and Piero della Francesca plotted their paintings as precise
cross-sections of the visual cone in an effort to replicate on the viewer's
retina the same configuration of forms the corresponding real world
objects would cause. Johannes Vermeer is one example among many of
an artist who very likely used a camera obscura in designing his works.
By the terms of this model, images must always be projections of
the world. Abstract or nonrepresentational pictures cannot be images;
the most this model will allow is that the forms of the world that consti
tute the image might be difficult to discern. The influence of this model
may have figured in some of Jackson Pollock's comments on his paint
ings. When he spoke of his abstractions, he reserved the term "image"
for depictive passages in them, but chose the word "painting" for the
abstract totality. "I tiy to stay away from any recognizable image; if it
creeps in, I try to do away with it... to let the painting come through. I
don't let the image carry the painting ... [but] recognizable images are
always there in the end."4 However, at about the same time, Pollock's
New York School colleague Barnett Newman used the term "plasmic
image" to describe a kind of abstract painting in which the forms were
meant to convey "some abstract intellectual content" regarding meta
physical issues, such as the experience of chaos and the mysteiy of life
and death (Newman 1945). The term "image" here is divorced from
projections of the world; its application to abstraction is idiosyncratic
and serves principally to establish distinctions within the category.
As an account of vision, the retinal image is limited. Jacques
Aumont has articulated the problem succinctly, evoking Descartes'
diagram: "We do not see our own retinal images. Only an ophthalmolo
gist using special equipment can see those. The retinal image is only
one stage of the process by which the visual system treats light. . ."
(1997: 8). Aumont echoes a long line of theorists, including Descartes,
who had argued that the mind is what sees, not the eye (Descartes 1985:
172). The retinal image is completely transformed into chemical and
electrical transmissions along neural pathways and synapses and into
the visual cortex. Still, the idea of the eye as seat of the image, which is
inverted but nonetheless formed by light rays according to strict opti
cal laws governed by geometry, has been among the most influential
models of the image in the modern Western artistic tradition.
SPIRITUAL LIKENESS
A crucial sense of "image" stems from the biblical precept that man
was created in the image of God:
And God said, "Let us make a human m our image, by our

likeness, to hold sway over the fish of the sea and the fowl
of the heavens and the cattle and the wild beasts and all
the crawling things that crawl upon the earth." And God
created the human in his image, in the image of God He
created him, male and female He created them (Genesis 1:
26-27).
In this sense, an image is understood to signify an essential spiritual

resemblance, which is distinct from any physical form, mental idea,
or picture. True images occupy the immaterial realm of soul. Divine
likenesses in the sensible, material world are raise and corrupt;
they are the idols prohibited in the commandments. By design, this
idea of images as true spiritual essences is vague and impossible to
picture.
W. J. T. Mitchell has explored this sense of image in a reading of
the passage from John Milton's Paradise Lost in which Adam and Eve are
described.
Two of far nobler shape erect and tall,
Godlike erect, with native Honor clad
In naked Majesty seem'd Lords of all,
And worthy seem'd, for in thir looks Divine
The image of thir glorious Maker shone,
Truth, Wisdom, Sanctitude severe and pure,
Severe, but in true filial freedom plac't" (1957 [1674]: 285).
As Mitchell explains:
Milton deliberately confuses the visual, pictorial sense of

the image with an invisible, spiritual, and verbal under
standing of it. Everything hinges on the equivocal function
of the key word "looks," which may refer us to the outward
appearance of Adam and Eve, their "nobler shape," naked
ness, and erectness, or to the less tangible sense of "looks"
as the quality of their gazes, the character of their "expres
sions." This quality is not a visual image that looks like
something else; it is more like the light by which an image
can be seen at all, a matter of radiance rather than reflec
tion (Mitchell 1984: 523).
Words can be more effective than pictures at keeping the image

abstract realm of spirit.
Some Christian sects shared Judaism's antipathy to pictorial
images, but the Christian doctrine of the incarnation—according to
which the son of God took human form in order to redeem the world
from original sin—opened the way for believing that at least some
forms of divinity could be visualized. Divine and saintly sanction for
this was inferred from legendary and miraculous images. According to
one medieval legend, Mary, the mortal mother of Christ, posed for a
portrait painted by St. Luke. In the church of San Marco in Venice is
a painting believed to be this image, known as St. Luke's Madonna or
the Icon of the Nicopeia. A later legend held that when a woman named
Figure 3: Domenico Fetti. The Veil of Veronica, 1618-1622, oil on panel, 32 χ
26 in., National Gallery of Art, Washington; Samuel H. Kress Collection.
Veronica used her veil to wipe the blood and sweat from the face of
the suffering Christ during his Passion, an image of his face was magi
cally imprinted on the veil (see figure 3). The latter is a case of more
than mere sanction for images: the divinity is implicated in the magical
production of the image, indeed is its driving force. Such images, clas
sified as acheiropoieta (supernatural images, not made by human hands)
were cherished as relics and associated with miracles. Divine approval
of specific images could also be discerned in miraculous power, which
copies of these sacred images could sometimes share.
Through centuries Christian sects argued over the relation of
image and object and the proper scope of images while striving to
maintain the distinction between spiritual likeness and dangerous idol.
Despite warnings about confusing the image with the person or thing
it represented, worshippers frequently behaved as if something of that
subject inhered in the image (Maniura and Shepherd 2006).
COMMONPLACE COMMODITY
A popular subject for nineteenth-century artists and writers was the

image seller—an itinerant peddler, usually of Italian or Greek descent,
whose wares were principally small-scale cast plaster models of famous
statues, ancient and modern. His staples included the Apollo Belvedere,
the Boy with Thorn, and works by Canova and Thorwaldsen ("Buy
Images!" 1854). In 1874, Harper's Weekly published a print of this subject
based on an unidentified painting (see figure 4). The accompanying text
describes the pictured scene as one of traditional bargaining between
peasants and salesman: the young women feign disinterest, but "in the
end the peasant girl will get the image, if she wants it, and the peddler
will go away grumbling, but secretly glad to have made a better bargain
than he expected." In the world pictured in this print, commercial
exchanges involving images were rule-governed, face-to-face transac
tions. The peddler offers up what looks like a naked child—probably
a cupid or putto—selected from the religious and mythological figures
arrayed on his carrying rack. The text specifies the location as a village
in Italy, although it notes that such peddlers were commonplace in
American cities and countryside, more so a few years earlier than at
that moment. Still then, however, "their hoarse and discordant cry of
'Imagees!' is frequently heard in far inland towns and villages, as well
as in the larger cities" ("Image-Seller" 1874).
This text and picture cherish an old-fashioned form of commerce
in images even as they participate in a rapidly changing modern one.
The Harper's Weekly print is a wood-engraving—a new form of wood
Figure 4: The Image Seller. Wood engraving, Harper's Weekly Jan. 31,
1874:113.
block print that could be executed quickly and, when reinforced with
electroplating, produce hundreds of thousands of copies. This process
made possible the proliferation of inexpensive illustrated newspapers
and magazines in the mid-nineteenth century, of which the Illustrated
London News, begun in 1842, was the prototype. It spawned imitators
in every country and reached a peak circulation of 310,000 in 1863. Its
success and that of its imitators across Europe and the United States
(including Harper's Weekly) changed the character of the mass-market
press. Pictures generated sales, and publications seeking large read
erships adapted themselves to include them. This situation elicited
comment as early as 1856: "There is now such a constant and ever
increasing demand for illustrations upon wood for every conceivable
purpose, in every book, magazine, and scientific journal almost, that
it cannot but furnish remunerative and reliable occupation to all who
excel in it" ("Wood Engraving" 1856: 53). Similarly, "the 'illustration'
mania is upon our people. Nothing but 'illustrated works' are profit
able to publishers; while the illustrated magazines and newspapers are
in everybody's hands—are vastly popular" ("'Illustrated' Works" 1857:
Ill; passage quoted in Mott 1967: 192 and Brown 2002: 7-8). Wood
engravings as book and newspaper illustrations were not the only
forms of pictures proliferating at this moment. Lithographs, chromo
lithographs, and new types of photographs—small portrait "cartes de
visites" and stereographic views—attracted mass markets that fostered
new industrialized production processes and national distribution
systems. This, too, was noted at the time:
Photography threatens to flood the world with the amateur

performances, on paper, of the Sun. Stereoscopic "views"
are becoming as thick as autumn leaves, and almost as
cheap. Lithographs are everywhere—even on posters and
bill heads, and the promise is that "the masses" will not
famish from want of something to look at. We may well
characterize this era as that of promiscuous production in
the way of pictures ("Art Gossip" 1860: 127-128).
"Pictures" and "images" became categories that encompassed any
and all artifacts made to be looked at, whatever the medium. Already
in 1848, Godey's Lady's Book was implementing a highly elastic version of
"picture":
We use the word "picture" in the child's sense, meaning

any kind of graphic representation, oil, watercolor, copper
plate, drawing, or wood-cut. And any one of these is worth
putting up in your room, provided you have mind enough
to get a pleasure from it, . . . Pin or stick up any engraving
whatsoever, at the hazard of its growing never so dirty. You
will keep it as clean as you can, and for as long a time; . . .
get a fresh one when you are able (Hunt 1848: 55).
This extension and homogenization of the field "pictures" is an effect

of the proliferation of industrially produced and mass-marketed image
artifacts at this time; likewise, the confidence that a picture dirtied by
being hung without a frame can be easily replaced. Visual artifacts in
different media blended with one another and sometimes subsumed
one another. The Harper's Weekly image is a good example of this: a

wood-engraving encompasses a painting that in turn subsumes a tray
of sculptures. All are images for sale and move easily across media; like
capital, they flow across boundaries.
So in the mid-nineteenth century, "image" was becoming synon
ymous with "picture," and both were names for the visual artifacts in
all media that were beginning to flood the world. These terms helped
to constitute a class of commodities by obscuring differences of mate
rial substrate and highlighting depictive or representational function.
They were conceptual and linguistic cornerstones of the radical social
and economic changes entailed in the formation of a mass visual
culture. The radicality of these changes is telegraphed in the labels
sometimes used for them: graphic revolution, flood of pictures, media
explosion, and cult of images (Boorstin 1962; Farwell 1977; Chu and
Weisberg 1994).
SUSPECT OBJECT
Chief among the challenges presented by proliferating images was

the need to distinguish trustworthy from deceptive ones. As the mass
produced images of the mid-nineteenth century reshaped and enlarged
the markets for information and entertainment, they also spread into
advertising and politics and became embroiled in the causes, conflicts,
fads, discoveries, and frauds of the time. Increasingly central to mass
politics, a competitive economy of consumption, and the organization
of society, images were exploited to seduce or persuade audiences and
manipulate public opinion. This spreading involvement of pictures in
rhetoric, manipulation, and outright deception led viewers to develop
skeptical attitudes toward them. Even the most impressively verisimilar
and "objective" image technologies—the photographic ones—became
widely recognized as potentially deceptive. Spirit photography was one
avenue for this. When some photographers attributed to the camera
the ability to register the presence of spirits of the dead among the
living, their opponents countered with detailed descriptions of varied
darkroom procedures for manufacturing the ghostly effects in their
pictures (Leja 2003). The ease with which photographs could be turned
to purposes of deception was touted in the daily papers. For their part,
advertisers, faced with a "well-defined public skepticism, the result of
innumerable humbugs," devised increasingly creative ways to disarm
wary consumers ("Advertising" 1910: 45).
Once again images became associated with deceptions; although
this time the demons were not blowing false visions into viewers' heads
but rather were placing them on paper before everyone's eyes.
The instrumentalized images of the nineteenth century metasta
sized into what Guy Debord labeled the "society of the spectacle.'The
spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image
(Debord 1995: 24).
Images detached from every aspect of life merge into

a common stream, and the former unity of life is lost
forever. . . . The tendency toward the specialization of
images-of-the-world finds its highest expression in the
world of the autonomous image, where deceit deceives
itself.... The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather,
it is a social relationship between people that is mediated
by images. (Debord 1995: 12)
In Debord's analysis of modern life, commodification permeates all

experience and behavior, and all of human life, including social rela
tions, becomes mere appearance. In these circumstances images are
all. They are ubiquitous objects of fascination that give distorted access
to a world no longer accessible to visual perception. Here the associa
tion of images with deception is nearly complete, although in Debord's
view images could be designed to work as weapons against the reign of
spectacle.
Debord was the most radical of a striking number of image
analysts in the period before and after World War II. One measure of
a shift at this time is the frequency of use of the term. Based on data
provided by Google Books Ngram Viewer for the word "image" in books
published in English, "image" begins a sharp and steady ascent in 1940
that continues to the present. Statements by artists in this period also
indicate that they were feeling the pressure of images. Painter Philip
Guston implied that the glut of man-made images was becoming a
burden: "We are image-makers and image-ridden" (Guston 1960: 38).
Barnett Newman considered image making an irrepressible human
drive preceding all others, including urges to satisfy material and social
needs. "Man first built an idol of mud before he fashioned an axe. . . .
The God image, not pottery, was the first manual act" (Newman 1947:
59-60). With the arrival of Pop art in the 1960s, the image became the
explicit subject of art, and Pop artists became known to the public
through exhibitions such as The Popular Image (Washington Gallery of
Modern Art 1963).
The image was now taken to be a constitutive ingredient of mass
culture, and it became a commonplace term in the intense debates
about the meaning and control of mass culture that unfolded between
Scenes from a History of the Image Ί0Ί7
the 1930s and the 1960s (Doris 2007). Walter Benjamin's now classic
essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,"
which first appeared in French in 1936, may be taken as an opening
volley. Although centrally concerned with works of art, as opposed
to images more broadly, and the ramifications of the loss of aura that
results from their mass reproduction, the essay also tracked changes
in the nature and use of images in mass culture: "The directives given
by captions to those looking at images in illustrated magazines soon
become even more precise and commanding in films, where the way
each single image is understood seems prescribed by the sequence
of all the images" (Benjamin 1936: 108). Theodor Adorno and Max
Horkheimer identified mass culture as a culture industry dedicated to
mass deception and domination. "The pretext of meeting the public's
spontaneous wishes is mere hot air. An explanation in terms of the
specific interests of the technical apparatus and its personnel would be
closer to the truth" (Adorno and Horkheimer 1995: 96). They analyze
the complex responses of consumers of mass culture to its images:
"That is the triumph of advertising in the culture industry: the compul
sive imitation by consumers of cultural commodities which, at the
same time, they recognize as false" (136).
Widely publicized at the time was the work of Marshall McLuhan,
whose 1951 preface to his Mechanical Bride cites a film expert speak
ing about the propaganda value of film: "it standardizes thought by
supplying the spectator with a ready-made visual image before he has
time to conjure up an interpretation of his own." McLuhan's purpose in
the book was to "reverse that process by providing typical visual imag
ery of our environment and dislocating it into meaning by inspection"
(McLuhan 1951: vi).
Daniel Boorstin's sense of "the image" was in some ways quite
similar to Debord's. He located its origins in the "graphic revolution"
of the nineteenth century, which initiated the process by which "vivid
image came to overshadow pale reality" (Boorstin 1962: 13). The full
realization of that process meant that "the efficient mass production
10Ί8 social research
of pseudo-events—in all lands of packages, in black-and-white, in
Technicolor, in words, and in a thousand other forms—is the work of
the whole machinery of our society" (36). That machinery was driven
by the appetites of consumers: "We create the demand for the illusions
with which we deceive ourselves" (5). Debord recognized Boorstin as
a kindred spirit who had gathered valuable empirical data about the
hegemonic power of the image in the United States, but he criticized
what he saw as Boorstin's failure to grasp the true nature of the prob
lern. To Debord, Boorstin's "outraged goodwill" placed all the blame
for the problem on "the system's external consequences" and thus
completely misunderstood the source of the problem.
A sociology that believes it possible to isolate an industrial

rationality, functioning on its own, from social life as a
whole, is liable likewise to view the technology of reproduc
tion and communication as independent of overall indus
trial development. Thus Boorstin accounts for the situation
he portrays in terms of an unfortunate and quasi-serendip
itous coming together of too vast a technology of image
diffusion on the one hand, and, on the other, too great an
appetite for sensationalism on the part of today's public.
The spectacle, in this view, would have to be attributed to
man's "spectatorial" inclinations. Boorstin cannot see that
the proliferation of prefabricated "pseudo-events"—which
he deplores—flows from the simple fact that, in face of the
massive realities of present-day social existence, individu
als do not actually experience events (Debord 1995:141).
For Debord, Boorstin had "no way of comprehending the true

depth of society's dependence on images" because he failed to see
its roots in the commodity form, which determined "private life as a
distinct reality" and "that reality's subsequent conquest by the social
consumption of images" (140).
BATTLEGROUND
Reading Debora battering Boorstin over "the image" evokes the long
history of conflict, often violent, around images. No theorist I know has
written violent conflict into a definition of the image, but history offers
strong reasons to do so, given the frequency with which images have
served as weapons, causes, and targets of attack. Art historian T. J. Clark
said as much with regard to the category of "representations": "society
is a battlefield of representations, on which the limits and coherence
of any given set are constantly being fought for and regularly spoilt"
(Clark 1985: 6). So did the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, although in
his case he was speaking of the narrower category "art":
All painters have been propagandists or they have not

been painters. Giotto was a propagandist of the spirit of
Christian charity, the weapon of the Franciscan monks of
his time against feudal oppression. Breughel was a propa
gandist of the struggle of the Dutch artisan petty bourgeoi
sie against feudal oppression. Every artist who has been
worth anything in art has been such a propagandist (Rivera
1973: 64).
Image-makers have sometimes sought to contest power and chal

lenge orthodoxies. This motive has been strong in political cartoons
as well as in the avant-garde tradition in modernist art. Thomas Nast's
drawings in Harper's Weekly during the 1860s and 1870s were credited
with bringing down the corrupt Tweed ring and the Tammany Hall
political machine in New York. The power of Nast's images often moved
his contemporaries to hyperbole: "His pencil [was] more to be dreaded
than the most ghastly engine of war" (Paine 1904: 178). When bribery
and intimidation fail, authorities may respond to subversive images
with censorship. In one of the most notorious incidents in US histoiy,
Rivera's mural for Rockefeller Center, Man at the Crossroads, was hacked
to pieces in the middle of the night when he refused to remove a portrait

of Lenin from the massive painting. Less directly violent means have
Figure 5a: Colossal Buddha at Figure 5b: Taliban Fighter Sits on
Bamiyan, Afghanistan, 5th-7th Rubble in Front of Demolished
century. Photograph © Ian Griffiths/ Buddha in Bamiyan © Reuters/Corbis

Robert Harding World Imagery/
Corbis
also been employed for censorship, including demonizing or defend

ing makers of offending images. And at times of revolutionary political
change, massive campaigns of destroying images associated with the
deposed power are common.
Political conflicts involving images have been more than matched
by religious ones. Christian sects alone have accounted for iconoclastic
violence in ancient Rome, in Byzantium in the eighth and ninth centu
ries, and across Europe during the reformation, and these battles have
sometimes generated sophisticated reflections on the nature of images
(Barber 2001). Islamic iconoclasm was witnessed most recently in the
destruction of the monumental Buddhas at Bamiyan in Afganistan in
2001 (see figure 5).
In 2002 a major international exhibition titled Iconoclash under
took "an archaeology of hatred and fanaticism" regarding images. It
highlighted science, religion, and art as realms revealing "three differ
ent patterns of image rejection and image construction, of image
confidence and image diffidence," all replete with situations of uncer
tainty, confusion, and hesitation surrounding images (Latour 2002:
14, 21). In the catalogue of the exhibition, Bruno Latour distinguished
five types of iconoclastic motivations: opposition to all images; oppo
sition to isolated images extracted from the flow and made into
objects of fascination; hatred of the specific images of an opponent
or enemy group; reckless vandalism; insolent mockery (Latour 2002:
26-32).
A less argumentative form of image destruction goes on around
us daily. As art historian Tom Gretton has pointed out, massive numbers
of original artifacts disappear every year as "part of the process of waste
disposal without which a culture would choke to death, a necessary
dimension of the processes of forgetting which, far more than those of
memorialization, fashion the past with which the present has to cope"
(Gretton 2007: 146). The rate of image production is so fast at present
that in order to keep up, the nature of disposal must be unsystematic
and impulsive. For curators, librarians, and database managers, these
conditions constitute an occupational hazard.
DIGITAL CODE
The digitization of the world of images has only begun, so the changes
it will produce in the meaning of "the image" largely remain to be seen.
One dystopian view of our situation predicts the end of the image. Paul
Virilio's view of the new order locates the rise of machinic vision in the
late 1870s, when photographic apparatuses able to freeze rapid motion

extended vision beyond human capacities. At this moment, time, not
space, became the basis of the image, and machines began to take over
the work of seeing. In a farther stage of this development, synthetic
images manufactured by graphic software pointed the way toward
synthetic vision and automated perception. These are developments in
which militaiy robotics, industrial automation, and security concerns
(surveillance) have played a dominant role.
The result is a realm of machinic vision to which our human
visual system has no access. "Image" becomes an empty word, because

computerized vision has no use for such quaint relics of human vision
and its clumsy ways of organizing visual data.
For the computer, the optically active electron image is

merely a series of coded impulses whose configuration
we cannot begin to imagine since, in this "automation of
perception," image feedback is no longer assured (Virilio
1994: 73).
Machinic vision functions "like a sort of electronic occipital

cortex," which is to say that visual data takes an abstract, coded form
not unlike the electrochemical signals that flow through the neural
and cortical components of vision translating the retinal image into
signs legible to the brain. The retinal image has no counterpart in this
system, and computer code and brain code are utterly incommensu
rable. If machine vision takes over all human production, it will mark
the end of the image in all the senses we have given this term and the
rise of a "sightless vision" to which the human visual system has no
access. If Virilio is right, the image has a much richer and longer past
than future.
But if humans do not turn vision entirely over to machines, then

the persistent oscillations Peter Galison has discerned in the history of
modern science, but which apply to most areas of human endeavor in
the modern world, are likely to continue.
'"We must have images; we cannot have images.'

"We must have scientific images because only images can
teach us. Only pictures can develop within us the intuition
needed to proceed further towards abstraction.... And yet:
we cannot have images because images deceive. Pictures
create artifactual expectations, they incline us to reason
on false premises. . . . The sciences find themselves locked
in a whirling embrace of iconoclasm and iconophilia. . . .
Images scatter into data; data gather into images" (Galison
2002: 300-301).
If we expand those functions beyond teaching and deceiving to

communicating, capturing beauty, fighting, dominating, shaping iden
tity, producing desires, fostering religious devotion and dispute, and
engaging the world, then the prospects for the survival of images look
far better.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Thanks to Gary Hatfield and Margaret Werth for valuable suggestions

and criticisms.
NOTES
1. Despite the absence of a comprehensive history, the literature on

images has been growing. Many valuable partial accounts of a histoiy
of the image are included in the references. Among those I would
highlight here are Lindberg (1976); Mitchell (1984); Belting (1994,
2011); Aumont (1997); Bredekamp (2003); and Didi-Huberman (2005).
2. Mitchell (1984) examines mental images beginning with Aristotle
and focusing on Wittgenstein.
3. Gombrich's narrow perceptual frame for the process of "correction"
has often been criticized. See, for example, Mitchell (1984: 524-525).
4. Pollock's statements are recorded in interview notes taken by Life
magazine writer Dorothy Seiberling in 1949. They are published in
Naifeh and Smith (1989; 591).
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ι024 social research
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Scenes from a History of the Image

Author(s): Michael Leja

A HISTORY OF THE IMAGE SHOULD BEGIN BY ACKNOWLEDGING

that the term forces a convergence of three fundamental human

social research Vol. 78 : No. 4 : Winter 2011 999

In Aristotle's philosophy of mind, images are the medium of thought.

To the thinking soul images [phantasmata] serve as if they

Aristotle understands thinking to work much like seeing, except

1000 social research

The imagination was no longer one among many auxiliary

This greater importance entailed greater moral and epistemological

be exceptionally dangerous. Writers from Saint Augustine to Saint

In a drawing from 1515 (see figure 1), Albrecht Dürer pictured

Scenes from a History of the Image 1001

Other samts—Catherine or Gregory, for example—were associ

1002 social research

Gombrich illustrates his point using the example of British

Scenes from a History of the Image 1003

Writing some three centuries after Aristotle in Rome, the atomist

... images, filmy presentments of objects,

These films reside on the surface

Forming a kind of skin or rmd, inasmuch as such image

journey... (Lucretius 1950: 124).

... tenuous tissues, thin pictures of objects,

Lucretius finds analogies for this model in highly diffused

1004 social research

According to Balzac's theory, all physical bodies are

Scenes from a History of the Image 1005

1006 social research

A version of the image based on the projected geometry of the world

Scenes from a History of the Image 1007

1008 social research

And God said, "Let us make a human m our image, by our

In this sense, an image is understood to signify an essential spiritual

Scenes from a History of the Image 1009

Milton deliberately confuses the visual, pictorial sense of

tion (Mitchell 1984: 523).

Words can be more effective than pictures at keeping the image

1010 social research

Scenes from a History of the Image 1011

A popular subject for nineteenth-century artists and writers was the

1012 social research

Scenes from a History of the Image 1013

Photography threatens to flood the world with the amateur

1014 social research

We use the word "picture" in the child's sense, meaning

This extension and homogenization of the field "pictures" is an effect

one another. The Harper's Weekly image is a good example of this: a

Scenes from a History of the Image 1015

Chief among the challenges presented by proliferating images was

Images detached from every aspect of life merge into

1016 social research

In Debord's analysis of modern life, commodification permeates all

Scenes from a History of the Image Ί0Ί7

10Ί8 social research

A sociology that believes it possible to isolate an industrial

For Debord, Boorstin had "no way of comprehending the true

Scenes from a History of the Image 1019

All painters have been propagandists or they have not

Image-makers have sometimes sought to contest power and chal

to pieces in the middle of the night when he refused to remove a portrait

1020 social research

century. Photograph © Ian Griffiths/ Buddha in Bamiyan © Reuters/Corbis

also been employed for censorship, including demonizing or defend