Images in Use

News coverage of EU negotiations, children’s war memories or TV series glamourising political processes – images pervade both private and public discourse, and visual communication plays a key role in our social negotiation of values. Conceptualising images as “images in use”, this volume considers the agencies behind visual communication and its impact on society.
Images in Use engages critically with traditional approaches to visual analysis, offers suggestions for alternative, socially situated analyses of images and demonstrates the explanatory force of thinking through “images in use” in a series of case studies. The conceptual contributions consider broader issues of critical theory, representation, as well as the mediatisation of politics. The case studies offer a survey of current visual communication including news coverage, political cartoons, political rhetoric, memory culture, celebrity humanitarianism, reality TV, as well as the narratives of blockbuster cinema and comics.
This volume proposes a new approach to visual communication, situating images in their social contexts and identifying the real, rhetorical and political impact of their use.

Paolo Nino Valdez, De La Salle University, in Discourse Studies, Vol. 15:6 (2013), pag. 786-787:
The volume is an excellent resource for students, teachers and researchers planning to pursue work on multimodal analysis, since it covers a range of theoretical and methodological approaches in the study of images in discourse. The significance of this work is its strong coherent blend of studies in the area from a variety of perspectives and settings. Specifically, the underlying theme of elucidating the political dimensions of analysing images considering socio-cultural factors imparts valuable insights for future investigations.