The Imagetext

Within ‘visual culture,’ considered as everything that we experience visually, only images and text are creations that are produced exclusively for visual consumption. Their correlation in this regard is seen in this very study - reading and writing about images. Yet image and text are often treated as entirely separate entities. This is what W.J.T. Mitchell calls the “fault line of representation” (Picture Theory) when an all too easy (and deeply entrenched) divide separates theory from practice, reason from intuition, authenticity from illusion, etc. While trying to dissolve such a dualism, recent theoretical interest has overwhelmingly been in favour of the image – raising the profile of ‘literate’ pictures so that they are codified and understood. In this study, Sheona Beaumont considers the seemingly overlooked sphere of text when asked to speak on image’s terms, as the evidence and experience of visually expressive text has largely gone without consideration. She considers two examples in detail: works by Rene Magritte and Marshall McLuhan, and she asks what happens when imagistic interpretation is brought to bear on the word.