We use images to immortalize precious moments, keep static what is passing, and pick from the countless life scenes, the scenes that represents us and how we see the world. In an image we can construct how the world looks to us, or how we imagine it ought to be. We find certain images that capture how we feel towards a person or a global event. We seek images that bring abstract and distant ideas into a concrete material meaningful form or make that which we thought we knew strange again. When talking to people about images that move them, they refer to images that captured what they could not express in words, images that captured the essence of a person or a phenomenon, images that represent how things used to be, or images of rupturing moments that changed life as they knew it.
This book is about the psychology of how we use images for social and political action and how images in our environment influence us. Whether it is an image of a bereaved loved one, a political event, or a significant moment, there is a choice made by a person, a group, or an authority, of what image – among all possible images – that will be the one best capturing how we feel – or ought to feel – about that which is represented in the image. Images that we choose, and those that surround us beyond our choice, shape not only who and what we remember and think about but more importantly how we remember and feel about them. They become sources of our common-sense knowledge and a continuous source for the reproduction – and, potentially, transformation of – our culture. This calls for a psychological approach to images that interrelates the individual, social, cultural, and political dynamics involved in how we relate to images.
The significance of images to human life is not new. Prehistoric cave paintings stand as a witness to how humans, beside fulfilling their basic needs of food and shelter, were also driven by the idea of representing their world through pictures. The 27,000-year-old Cosquer cave, for example, in Marseille is home to hundreds of paintings of animals, hand stencils, and sexual symbols. What purpose did those images serve for those painting them? Painting could have been a ritual in a religious or a social practice. It could have provided a way to represent and give meaning to their experience. It could have been a way of communicating with present and imagined others. There could also have been a motive – similar to many graffiti painters today – to mark: ‘we were here’.
These are all intriguing questions, and the same sense of wonder is behind the focus of this book, namely what purposes do images serve in contemporary society. Many aspects have changed when looking at our relationship with images today, while some core aspects remain the same. There have been major technological developments that facilitate our access to images as tools to express ourselves and share everyday experiences. If you have a smartphone and access to the internet, you can take photos, create images using software programs and artificial intelligence, share and edit other people’s images, and even report and censor them. This change in accessibility presents us with different possibilities and challenges.
For the sceptic, this change has made us over-occupied with self-representation. As image producers, we take selfies, document where we go and what we eat, and at times prioritize taking photos of experiences rather than actually experiencing them. We take images of others and represent them in ways that might polarize, dehumanize, or defame. As viewers, we are immersed in an abundance of images, learning to swipe through them to know what is happening in the world and in people’s lives, to shop, and to find dating partners. As image subjects, we are continuously looked upon and surveyed. In one hour today, more images are produced and shared than those created in all of the nineteenth century (Sturken & Cartwright, Reference Sturken and Cartwright2018). Did this abundance take away something from what images mean? There is a common idea about the power of the image and how it is worth a thousand words, but what happens when we have a thousand images of every moment? Throughout the book, I tackle how this abundance has influenced the power of the image, its credibility, and ideas about its originality and authorship as images spread and transform every second and are harder to trace to one artist, photographer, or even human in the case of artificial intelligence.
For the hopeful, this change has a democratizing potential. With growing access to representation and documentation follows a promise to de-centralize the control over what is seen and who is seen. We can see more images of world happenings from the perspective of eyewitnesses rather than the images news agencies decide to publish. We can document injustices and state violence, and have the tools to look back at authorities and hold them accountable. We can also, like the cave painter, represent ourselves and our world the way we see it, and counter misrepresentations. However hopeful this perspective is, not everyone has the same tools or platforms for visibility. Governments, news agencies, and corporations and their algorithms, still have a privileged access in moderating who is seen and how they are seen. Hence it is important to look for who among this new accessibility and abundance is still made absent from public visibility.
I examine the critical and the hopeful perspectives through a theoretical and methodological framework with a focus on one key fascinating aspect about images: their transformative social lives. When followed, they can show us why, when, and how images can matter as powerful cultural tools. An image’s social life starts when it is created by a person in a certain social context that drives their motivation and informs what is in the image and where it is placed. The image, once out there in the public space, takes on a social life of its own with certain affordances. It is seen by many viewers who each interprets it according to their own position. Some viewers would be so intrigued by the image that they would share it, move it from one context to another, or change how it looks and produce a new version of it with their own meaning. Some viewers would feel so violated with the image that they would decide that its life must be cut short, that neither they nor anyone else should see what the image represents any longer. They would then try to censor it by attempting to physically or virtually stop its life, and – if radical enough – go after those who created it.
Images vary in their lives. Some have short lives with little public attention. Some go viral and live on in many different forms to become famous visual symbols we identify with. Their lives are dependent on what we do with them and what they mean to us. Each of us is an image producer, viewer, and censor, shifting positions based on what we see and what we feel about it. The lives of images reveal the individual psychological level of how we think, feel, and remember through images as cultural artefacts that carry multiple and changing meanings. The transformation in the images’ social lives also show the interactional level of how images are tools for social action that we use on ourselves, others, and the bigger society. And, finally, seeing the meaning transformation, contestation, and development of an image’s social life shows the broader societal and political context that facilitates or inhibits a visual dialogue. In other words, images’ social lives happen at the intersection of the individual and the sociocultural, and the private and the public.
Throughout this book, I present an invitation to revisit the language and approach we use to analyse images to be able to understand their psychological influence in today’s visual culture and how people make meaning of them in everyday life. Images today are accessible and abundant like never before, and they need to be studied through accessible methods and accessible language. They are not only hidden valleys of the unconscious that can be revealed by the psychoanalyst, they are not only exclusive art objects that can be understood by the art expert, and they are not only bound by a signs system that can be decoded by the semiotician. Some of the most popular and viral images today are quite far away from what many would conceive as art. This requires an approach that pays attention to the ordinary, the banal, the redundant, the unnoticeable, and the ugly images that circulate and mobilize people. What is attractive about President Trump hugging the American flag, or Pepe the Frog wearing a Klu Klux Klan hood, or a Grumpy Cat meme image?
The meaning of the image is not confined within the image or in the mind of its producer but is acquired throughout the image’s circulation as different people do different things with it. The meaning changes throughout the image’s social life as it becomes part of different social practices of production, reproduction, and viewership, and as it is situated in different environments. The social lives of images show what we do with images and, more importantly, show what images do to us; how they make us look, look away, relate to, or repel from what we see. The metaphor of images having a social life does not mean that images are vital beings that act on us, rather it means that we do things with images that affords them with certain potential affordances to act back on us.
I argue throughout the book that there is an inherent psychological and political aspect in studying images in public space. In any given space, there are politics of representations: who has the privileged access to image production and circulation, who is represented in those images, and how they are represented. Those processes inform our understandings of group identities, collective memory, social positioning, and power. Those topics are essential for a progressive psychological science that investigates how inequalities are reproduced in everyday visual culture, how social movements shape emotions and mobilize action through images, and how the visual could be used to promote inclusion and recognition of different communities. I aim with this approach to bring in the image as an object and method of study to inform a psychology that is oriented towards social change and concerned with power and how it is exercised, acknowledging how our lives are social and communal, with thoughts, feelings, and actions as not just individual but also collective in nature.
In the first part of the book, I start Chapter 1 by identifying what I mean by public images in visual culture and why they are relevant psychologically. I will then present in Chapter 2 the theoretical framework, where images are conceptualized as cultural artefacts that are both signs open for meaning making and tools open for social action. They are also dialogical and political artefacts that take part in knowledge production and circulation. Then, in Chapter 3, I integrate sociocultural psychology with other disciplines within psychology such as cognitive, social, and neuro psychology, and outside psychology such as sociology, visual studies, and philosophy, to tackle the power of images to influence our seeing, thinking, feeling, and remembering.
In the second part of the book, I present the analytical framework by following the social life of images. I start in Chapter 4 with the birth of the image and ways of understanding the intentions and motivations of image producers. I then look in Chapter 5 at the body of the image itself and present ways of interpreting what is contained in an image. After that, I address in Chapter 6 the immediate material environment and placement of the image and the extended environment that includes the sociocultural, historical and political context in which the image circulates. Then I move in Chapter 7 to look at the viewers of the image and the different ways people appropriate images informed by their social positions. In Chapter 8, I turn to the development of images, and how they are transformed as they travel and circulate. Then in Chapter 9 I tackle the destruction of images, which leads to a discussion of the death – and potential rebirth – of images. In each of the chapters in Part II, I draw on a case example from a specific context with a specific image genre that varies from protest posters, caricatures, graffiti, political campaigns, and photojournalism to social media memes. Rather than presenting one method for doing visual research, I draw on my own and other researchers’ empirical work to present a range of methodological possibilities that are suited for different image genres, different focus areas based on which aspect of the social life one focuses on, and what datasets one has access to.
In Chapter 10, the final chapter, I end with a discussion about when do images still matter despite their abundance and why images have an ambivalent relationship with reality. Can we distinguish between images that reflect reality, manipulate reality, or help us imagine an alternative reality? Can we talk of a ‘good’ image, a powerful one that lives on, and invites dialogue? Can we talk of a ‘just’ image? We want images that do us justice, whether it is for our personal memories or grieving, or for our collective identity and society. In our effort to be seen and recognized, we do not just seek an image, we seek a ‘just image’ – as Roland Barthes (Reference Barthes and Howard1981) puts it. We seek an image that would do us justice and an image that would survive among the abundance of images surrounding us.
