“The true mystery of the world is the visible.”
—Oscar Wilde
“Just remember: what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”
—Donald J. Trump
National convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars
Kansas City, Missouri, July 24, 2018
“It is proven more and more true every day that images matter, that it is images that are making the political changes that we see happening around us possible. Focusing on what those images are, and how they work, and how they can be changed to work otherwise, is not a side issue anymore, it’s a necessity. And trying to separate ‘real politics’ from ‘mere aesthetics’ is a mistake. It matters what we imagine to be possible. Change can only happen if we imagine things differently.”
—David Levi Strauss, “On Images & Magic: Towards an Iconopolitics of Belief”
Not too long ago, I had lunch with a friend I...
University of California Press