A new, ecological approach to images by a renowned philosopher
When Susan Sontag first proposed the idea of an “ecology of images,” she meant it as an exhortation to be vigilant against the vast surplus of pictures threatening our ability to truly see. Today, beyond the deep anxieties over a diminishing attention economy, concern focuses on the environmental cost of storing and circulating the digital images that confront us with unprecedented speed.
Against the disposable rapidity demanded by digital media, Peter Szendy emphasizes the labor and time required for images to develop and come into view. This inquisitive essay takes us from mimicry in the animal kingdom to the history of the shadow, Pliny’s story about the birth of painting to Nabokov’s butterflies, the first use of slo-mo in film to the first aerial photograph.
What People Are Saying
"Peter Szendy is a dazzlingly original philosopher, as witty as he is erudite. For an Ecology of Images finds him at the height of his powers, as he outlines what he calls the ‘shadows’ of our future." Adam Shatz, author of The Rebel’s Clinic
"Wide-ranging across the history of science, visual arts, and photography, this short book packs a lot in. Szendy understands the Kabbalistic principle that moving one letter can alter the universe: cosmicomic is cosmiconic, economy is iconomy, ecology is icology. He has shown us how to swim when we are all drowning in pictures." John Durham Peters, co-author of Promiscuous Knowledge