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In Tracey Warr’s essay, ‘Image as Icon: Recognising the Enigma’, she identifies and discusses four discourses of performance photography–the document, the icon, the simulacrum and the live act–and what is at stake in these discourses is the ‘truth’. (more…)

We live in a society that is constantly bombarded with endless images. We are surrounded by suggestions about what we should eat, how we should dress, where we should live. Of course, we are ‘free’ to choosebut we all know that these choices are anything but free. (more…)

Combined with semiotic signification, the images of contemporary mass media, in the form of advertising, cinema, television and print media form a nexus of meaning with the viewer at the centre. As suggested by Stuart and Elizabeth Ewen in Channels of Desire: Mass Images and the Shaping of American Consciousness (1982), such images become both reflective and creative, at once providing a mirror on and a foundation for the simulacra of modernity such as lifestyle and consumer aspirations. (more…)