Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images

by Barbara Maria Stafford

Building on the arguments of her previous books, Body Criticism (MIT Press, 1991) and Artful Science (MIT Press, 1994), Good Looking challenges the reflexive identification of images with vice. Today rampant criticism, both inside and outside the academy, condemns the immoralities of aesthetic illusion, museum display, 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. Instead of more "improving" theoretical discourse, 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—these twelve essays connect a disappearing lens culture to the digital diaphanousness of the twenty-first century.

288 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1996

Reviews

[Ida]

From the introduction:

"Writing about what is wrong in old optical formats and new imaging technologies is relatively easy. Harder is proposing mind-opening analogies between historical display of visual intelligence and computer-age information viewed through the eyes. Being digital requires designing a post-Gutenbergian constructive model of education through vision."

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

Academic book discussing the positive side of images and image "reading" - why it shouldn't take a back seat to text. Probably an oversimplification of the essays.