| This is a project about “moving images” in at least three senses. I will explore several sets of images that have physically moved in the sense that they have circulated among geographical locations, time periods, genre, and medium. The often unpredictable effects of these movements on reception provide possibilities for rich insights regarding relationships among an image's formal characteristics, its cultural, historical context of production and its cultural, historical context of reception. These relationships also offer us a sense of how images “move” people in a second way—how they resonate with certain viewers at particular times or places, or for seemingly unanticipated reasons. In order to investigate these questions I draw upon explanations that invoke compositional form, historical and cultural contexts, as well as psychic mechanisms that are facilitated through the act of looking. Last, behind all of the images I explore lurks the question of how images may “move” viewers in a political sense. I deal with this third type of movement in two ways: first, by examining ways in which images respond to or mobilize social action; and second, by discussing a possible political strategy for spectatorship that enables viewers to view images subversively. The spectatorship strategy that I discuss relies upon allowing oneself to be moved by images, but at the same time, resisting the comfortable options of explaining their significance, ignoring their effects, or refusing their pleasures. This, in the words of Samuel Weber, “means relearning how to be struck by the signifier…In the theatre of the unconscious, one never gets over being stage-struck”(Weber 151). |
