Photography: Home

Next to Yosemite and the High Sierra, the Southwest was closest to Ansel Adams' heart. It was there, in the early 1930s, that he met photographer Paul Strand and decided to make photography his life's work. In his words, "wherever one goes in the Southwest one encounters magic, strength, and beauty." In The Grand Canyon and the Southwest, Adam's little known images of the Grand Canyon make up roughly one quarter of the photographs selected and edited by his longtime editor, Andrea Stillman. The varied images portray the balance of desolation and stark beauty in the Southwestern landscape, from Texas to California. The pictures are complemented by an introduction by Andrea Stillman and a selection of Adams' vivid letters about the region. In a letter to Alfred Stieglitz he writes, "It is all very beautiful and magical here - a quality which cannot be described. You have to live it and breathe it, let the sun bake it into you. The skies and land are so enormous, and the detail so precise and exquisite . . ."

Why do we have such extraordinarily powerful responses toward the images and pictures we see in everyday life? Why do we behave as if pictures were alive, possessing the power to influence us, to demand things from us, to persuade us, seduce us, or even lead us astray? According to W. J. T. Mitchell, we need to reckon with images not just as inert objects that convey meaning but as animated beings with desires, needs, appetites, demands, and drives of their own. "What Do Pictures Want?" explores this idea and highlights Mitchell's innovative and profoundly influential thinking on picture theory and the lives and loves of images. Ranging across the visual arts, literature, and mass media, Mitchell applies characteristically brilliant and wry analyses to Byzantine icons and cyberpunk films, racial stereotypes and public monuments, ancient idols and modern clones, offensive images and found objects, American photography and aboriginal painting. Opening new vistas in iconology and the emergent field of visual culture, he also considers the importance of Dolly the Sheep--who, as a clone, fulfills the ancient dream of creating a living image--and the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11, which, among other things, signifies a new and virulent form of iconoclasm. "What Do Pictures Want?" offers an immensely rich and suggestive account of the interplay between the visible and the readable. A work by one of our leading theorists of visual representation, it will be a touchstone for art historians, literary critics, anthropologists, and philosophers alike. "A treasury of episodes--generally overlooked by art history and visual studies--that turn on images that 'walk by themselves' and exert their own power over the living."--Norman Bryson, "Artforum "