The Present Image explores the world of images in the contemporary, increasingly digitized, habitats of the world. Moving across a theoretical spectrum that brings visual and digital culture in touch with anthropology, political theory, phenomenology and art-history, and based on the author’s practice-based involvement with images, the book argues against the idea of the digital as a revolution in the world of images. “Present images” are the result of a dialectic between the material and the immaterial, the manual and the mechanical, the visible and the audible, the old and the new. Offering an analysis containing simultaneously elements of timeliness and timelessness, the book addressed practices such as VR and 360 degrees, iDocs and action cameras in a dialogue with classical art, religious iconography, early photography and contemporary art. In the final chapter the book explores the significance of images and image-making in the context of dying, mourning and living.

A powerful real world poetry collection about issues in Asia, from Afghanistan to India via Singapore. Asia is a huge area of the world and the problems and topics raised here are cutting edge and powerful. From the ongoing Philippine drug war to the Kashmir question, the work here is both memorable and soul searching. Everybody in Asia and further afield will find this book interesting and thought provoking. Priya Verma illustrates the book with simple but powerful cartoon images. Think of the man stood in front of the tank in Tienanmen Square, you get the idea. Everybody from President Putin to Premier Xi to the normal person in the street/field need to read this book. If only to bring awareness on the issues and broaden the solutions. A welcome book on Asian issues that are global by Visually Impaired author Saurabh Pant. Hard copy book version.

Showcases portrait photography of African Americans taken from the 1890s through the 2000s, along with text discussing the evolution of the idea of beauty for men and women.

The phrase 'War on Terror' has quietly been retired from official usage, but it persists in the American psyche, and our understanding of it is hardly complete. Exploring the role of verbal and visual images in the War on Terror, the author finds a conflict whose shaky metaphoric and imaginary conception has created its own reality.

Focusing on intermediality, The Material Image situates film within questions of representation familiar from the other arts: What is meant by figuring the real? How is the real suggested by visual metaphors, and what is its relation to illusion? How is the spectator figured as entering the text, and how does the image enter our world? The film's spectator is integral to these concerns. Cognitive and phenomenological approaches to perception alike claim that spectatorial affect is "real" even when it is film that produces it. Central to the staging of intermediality in film, tableaux moments in film also figure prominently in the book. Films by Scorsese, Greenaway, Wenders, and Kubrick are seen to address painterly, photographic, and digital images in relation to effects of the real. Hitchcock's films are examined with regard to modernist and realist effects in painting. Chapters on Fassbinder and Haneke analyze the significance of tableau for the body in pain, while a final chapter on horror film explores the literalism of psychopathic tableau. Here, too, art and the body—images and the real—are juxtaposed and entwined in a set of relations.

This book argues that the extraordinary force of the image in contemporary life?the contemporary imaginary?can be traced back to the Byzantine iconoclastic controversy of the eighth and ninth centuries.