The Lives of Images, Vol. 1

The Lives of Images, edited by Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, is a set of contemporary thematic readers designed for educators, students, practicing photographers, and others interested in the ways images function within a wide set of cultural practices. The series tracks the many movements and “lives” of images—their tendency to accumulate, circulate, and transform through different geographies, cultures, processes, institutions, states, uses, and times.

Volume 1 of the series, Repetition, Reproduction, and Circulation, addresses the multiple life cycles of the image—its modes of dispersion, reception, consumption, and aggregation—and the significance of technological reproduction for contemporary forms of social, cultural, and political life. The image is considered both a tool for liberation and a means of repression within the evolving structures of modern life. The essays consider the implications of the nature and effect of the reproducible image on the categories, shapes, and aims of contemporary art and society. Further grounded by two interviews with practitioners in the field, Repetition, Reproduction, and Circulation promises to be an accessible, rigorous, and timely resource for all students, educators, and practitioners of photography.Contributions by Giorgio Agamben, Kate Palmer Albers, Erika Balsom, Aria Dean, Jodi Dean, Cora Gilroy-Ware, Boris Groys, Miriam Bratu Hansen, Rabih Mroué, and Hito Steyerl

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Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa (editor) is a photographer, writer, and graduate director of the photography MFA program at the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence. He is the author of a book of selected essays, Dark Mirrors (2021); and his most recent photographic publication, Hiding in Plain Sight (coauthored with fellow artist Ben Alper), was published by the Harun Farocki Institute in summer 2020. His work was recently exhibited at the International Center of Photography, New York, and in the Biennale für aktuelle Fotografie, Mannheim, Germany. He has contributed essays to catalogues and monographs by Rosalind Fox Solomon, George Georgiou, Paul Graham, Steve McQueen, and Vanessa Winship. Wolukau-Wanambwa has guest edited The Photobook Review and written for Aperture, FOAM, and for both the Barbican and the Photographers’ Gallery, London. He was an artist-in-residence at Light Work, Syracuse, New York, in 2015.