In the twenty-first century images are everywhere. We notice them, analyze them, engage them, ignore them, enjoy them, seek them out. We watch T.V., and movies, go to see art, pass by advertisements, decorate our homes—we live in and around images at all times. These images have categories and terms of engagement. We determine our levels of engagement with these images by their categories. As an art history student, I was taught the traditional art historical methods for engaging art objects, and learned how to adjust these methods depending on what the object demands. But my desire to understand all the images that inhabit every corner of my life extends beyond studying art. This blog is an effort to delegate some space for the analysis of images that do and don’t get printed in art history text books, hung on museum walls, or illuminated by projectors on classroom screens. In academia, there is a slow change occurring that reveals a desire to acknowledge the place of images in contemporary culture beyond the disciplines of art history and film studies. Classes and sub-departments dedicated to media or visual studies hint at the fact that the traditional academic disciplines can be seen to have blind spots in these areas.
But for some dedicated image-enthusiasts such as myself this change isn’t happening fast enough.
Each post will offer some analysis of images, related in content, context, or aesthetic quality, that I come across in any of the previously mentioned channels. My analysis of these images is posited only as a starting point for what I hope to be discussions that will give these images the critical attention they deserve.
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