This book explores the many fascinating aspects of Western culture's relationship to images, vision, and human understanding. Much of the discussion in this book is devoted to a study of photography, to the cinema and video, and to questions about vision, discourse, language, and the sociocultural context of modern media. The book proposes that the Western relationship to images is not as dependent on the activities of seeing or listening as we often presume. The assumption that to look means to see, or that to see means to understand, is derived from models of mind which for the most part conceive of human consciousness as a mirror of the world we inhabit....The intimate linkages between thought and vision, suggested by the complementary aspects of these discursive characteristics, will be explored in greater detail in this book....At the heart of this debate, itself part of a broader philosophical and cultural argument about the relationship between subject and object, are a variety of quandaries and contradictions about the many different and complex relationships between vision and knowledge (3-4).

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