The study of images and their use as media for communication, ex­pression, reasoning, persuasion and much more, is a relatively recent development in academia - even if the inquiry into the nature and value of depiction goes back to at least Plato. It has several different roots: in philosophers investigating representation and evidence, in art historians exploring the status of one of their major objects, in structuralists advancing the idea of a visual semiotics, in psychologists experiment­ing on perception and cognition, in media scholars focusing on the per­suasive and ideological powers of images, in historians of science scru­tinizing the role of diagrams in the development of the sciences. The study of images is a genuinely interdisciplinary field, and our aim with this book is to provide a snapshot overview of this emerging field of study by means of the special tool developed by the Five Questions book series.


Contributions from Mieke Bal, Gernot Böhme, Marta Braun, Horst Bredekamp, James Robert Brown, Matthias Bruhn, James Elkins, Groupe μ, Robert Hopkins, John Hyman, Claude Imbert, Martin Jay, John M. Kennedy, Dominic McIver Lopes, Patrick Maynard, W. J. T. Mitchell, Bence Nanay, Barbara Maria Stafford, Felix Thürlemann, and Kendall L. Walton.