Travelling Images: Looking Across the Borderlands of Art, Media and Visual Culture

Images move. They travel, migrate and transform, disappearing and reappearing in time and space through reproductions, copies, appropriations and re-use. The processes involved in these movements are fascinating in their own right, but they also have significant implications for our understanding of art and art historical narratives.This book provides a critical examination of travelling images in the borderlands of the art world. Through four in-depth case studies - on photocollage, advertising, fashion and journalism - it investigates relations and exchanges between visual art and vernacular mass culture from the 1870s to the present day. Merging perspectives from art history and visual culture studies with media studies, it combines a focus on the individual case with a focus on processes and systems, continuities and ruptures, and alternative histories. What emerges is not only a social biography of images but also, on a more profound level, a biography of the very idea of art.Making innovative use of a wide variety of visual sources, Travelling images displays the rich possibilities of image studies. It is essential reading for scholars of art history and visual culture, and will also find an audience in the disciplines of history, fashion studies, marketing and media.