Impossible Presence

This text brings together work in film studies, critical theory, art history, and anthropology for a multifaceted exploration of the continuing proliferation of visual images in the modern era. It also asks what this proliferation - and the changing technologies that support it - mean for the ways in which images are read today and how they communicate with viewers and spectators. The essays focus on two kinds of strangeness involved in experiencing visual images in the modern era. The first, evoked in the book's first half, involves the appearance of oddities or phantasmagoria in early photographs. The second type of strangeness involves art from marginalized groups and indigenous peoples, and the communicative formations that result from the trafficking of images from vastly different cultures.