Image and text

The previous chapter considered the image as a complex and shifting phenomenon. We discovered any one single image can be understood to exist in a much wider ecology of images and that there are many different states of the image, making up a diverse ‘family’, which include the graphic, optical, perceptual, mental and verbal. This chapter continues along these lines, but pays specific attention to the relationship between text and image. Key points of interest include the role of language in interpreting the image; the purported rise of a contemporary image culture; the enduring (and often fraught) relationship between image and power; and formal distinctions and commonalities between image and text. The chapter begins with a consideration of what is termed the ‘pictorial turn’. There then follows a brief history of iconoclasm as well as a return to Mitchell's ‘Family of Images’ to consider the potential root of all images as ‘likeness’, which again, importantly, blurs the boundary of ‘the visual, pictorial sense of the image with an invisible, spiritual, and verbal understanding’ (Mitchell, 1987, p.35).