Good Looking

Building on the arguments of her previous books, the author challenges the reflexive identification of images with vice. Criticism condemns the immoralities of aesthetic illusion, cable television and hypermedia. Believing with the American pragmatists that it is harder to do than to denounce, Barbara Stafford urges imagists to abandon Foucault's bankrupt paradigm of verbal combat. She calls for developing a positive visual praxis on the interpretive ruins of linguistic postmodernism. Organized around three major themes - the explosion of optical information, the urgency of inventing an imaging interdiscipline and the ethical dilemmas of technological transparency - the essays in this text connect a disappearing lens culture to the digital diaphanousness of the 21st century.