By viewing the corporation as a communicator, Image Worlds links the histories of labor, business, consumption, engineering, and photography, providing a new perspective on one of the largest and most representative corporations. General Electric was one of the first modern industrial corporations to use photographs and other media resources to create images of itself; and the GE archives, comprising well over a million images, form one of the largest privately held collections in the world. To produce this venturesome book, David Nye has used these vast archives to develop a new approach to corporate ideology through corporate iconography.Image Worlds embraces symbols, intentional signs, and photographs on the one hand and the history of institutional and technological development on the other. It views photography as a developing technology with a history of its own, and presents the corporation as a communicator as well as a producer and employer.Illustrated with nearly 60 photographs from the archives, the book identifies five "image markets" that GE sought to organize and address. Company engineers, workers, and managers received publications designed to appeal to their presumed interests. Some of these grew into public journals with a scientific-educational mission; others were restricted in circulation even within the company. At the same time, illustrated mass-media advertising was created to reach potential consumers of GE products. Advertising that presented an image of GE as a place where "progress was the most important product." While GE was promoting this enlightened image, the company was also using its resources to reach the voting public, hoping to gain their support for private electrification in the national debate over municipal power.David E. Nye is Associate Professor of American History at Odense University in Denmark.

Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition, popularly called the Chicago World’s Fair, or the White City, was the largest and most spectacular world’s fair ever built. The Columbian Exposition opened on May 1, 1893, and more than 21,000,000 people visited the fair during the six months it was open to the public. The White City was a seminal event in America’s history that changed the way the world viewed Chicago. Fortunately, the fair was documented in stunning photographs by commercial and amateur photographers. This volume tells the story of the fair from its construction in Jackson Park to its destruction by fire after the fair had closed. Photographs of the exhibition halls, state buildings, foreign buildings, indoor and outdoor exhibits, the attractions of the Midway, and the various ways to move about the fairgrounds give a sense of how visitors experienced this extraordinary time and place.

The World Created in the Image of Man investigates the development of the third dimension in painting from the dramatic moment when spatial construction becomes charged with an external force antagonistic to the effort of forms, or human figures, to preserve their permanence. The competitive contact between the external and internal worlds represented in the picture brings a vital element to the unfolding of art as it occurs in both the West and the East. As the analysis of masterpieces from different historical periods and cultures demonstrates here, this vital impulse becomes a necessary part of pictorial composition and the measure of the quality of the work of art. It can reveal itself in a limitless and disparate variety of subject matter: a scene from Japanese court life, as depicted in the illustrations of the early twelfth century to the novel The Tale of Genji; a representation of the maternal feeling of the Virgin anticipating the fate of her child in Byzantine icon painting; Raphael's «universal interior» in The School of Athens; Rembrandt's allegory of historic continuity in Aristotle with the Bust of Homer. The progression of this dynamic eventually leads to the surrender of form to space with the Impressionists; and to the conclusion of the book, which considers Postmodern art in the form of the installation, where the emphasis is put on the unprecedented role of the viewer as a component of the work, and which suggests an environment that is totally alien, or even hostile to him. Art historians, students of art history and the educated general reader with an interest in painting will find this book a rewarding and stimulating read.

One of the most controversial issues that divided Islamic philosophers and theologians during the Middle Ages was whether human beings would have a spiritual or bodily existence after death. The idea of a world of image was conceived as a solution, suggesting that there exists a world of non-physical (imagined) bodies, beyond our earthly existence. This world may be reached in sleep, in meditation or after death.From the embryonic conception by Ibn Sina, to the radical rethinking by Suhrawardi and Shahrazuri into a sophisticated system, L. W. C. van Lit unravels the history of this idea. Using a distant reading approach for measuring the transmission, he further shows how the idea remained relevant for Muslim thinkers through the centuries, up until today.

Examines how peoples of other nations perceive the U.S., how media of other nations portray the U.S., and how exported media products impact the U.S. image around the world.

This unique window on history employs hundreds of images and written records from Japanese periodicals during World War II to trace the nation's transformation from a colorful, cosmopolitan empire in 1937 to a bleak "total war" society facing imminent destruction in 1945. The author draws upon his extensive collection of Japanese wartime publications to reconstruct the government-controlled media's narrative of the war's goals and progress - thus providing a close-up look at how the war was shown to Japanese on the home front. Many of these visual and written sources are rare in Japan and were previously unavailable in the West. Strikingly, the narrative remains consistent and convincing from victory to retreat, and even as defeat looms large. Earhart's nuanced reading of Japan's wartime media depicts a nation waging war against the world and a government terrorizing its own people. At once informed, scholarly, and readily accessible, this lavishly illustrated volume offers an accurate representation of the official Japanese narrative of the war in contemporary terms. The images are fresh and compelling, revealing a forgotten world by turns familiar and alien, beautiful and stark, poignant and terrifying.

A new 2024 translation of Heidegger's early work "The Time of the World Image" (original German "Die Zeit des Weltbildes"), which is one of the 6 major essays of the work "Holzwege" originally published in 1914. This edition contains a new afterword by the Translator, a timeline of Heidegger's life and works, a philosophic index of core Heideggerian concepts and a guide for Existentialist terminology across 19th and 20th century Existentialists. This translation is designed for readability and accessibility to Heidegger's enigmatic and dense philosophy. Complex and specific philosophic terms are translated as literally as possible and academic footnotes have been removed to ensure easy reading. Heidegger here explores Worldviews, focusing on Life-Views. He focuses on the transformation in the way the world is understood and represented in modernity. Heidegger examines the concept of the "world picture," which means more than a mere image of the world; it means a world that has been conceived and grasped as an image. This transformation leads to a fundamental change in the relationship between human beings and their world that underlies modern science, technology, and the understanding of being itself. Heidegger also comments on the origins of Nihilism, although he provides no antidote to the "renunciation of all values". The collection this paper comes from, Holzwege, is second only to "Being and Time" in fame. Here he levies some of his most perceptive commentary on Hegel, Descartes, Nietzsche, Anaximander, Rilke, and Hölderlin. Wood Paths consists of a collection of essays that reflect on philosophical and existential questions through the analysis of art, poetry, and history. The original German title "Holzwege" refers to the logging paths in German forests, which anyone who's hiked in Germany knows are always dead-ends. Hence, this is sometimes translated as "dead ends" or "logging roads" or "Off the Beaten Track" or something along those lines, as this is what the title means- the dead end trails of philosophy and the inherent obscurity of the pursuit of Being. Heidegger uses these essays to explore his ontological inquiries, particularly the nature of being and the relationship between human beings and the world around them.

The book examines the process of symbolic and material alteration of religious images in antiquity, the middle ages and the modern period. The process by which the form and meaning of images are modified and adapted for a new context is defined by a large number of spiritual, religious, artistic, geographical or historical circumstances. This book provides a defined theoretical framework for these symbolic and material alterations based on the concept of iconotropy; that is, the way in which images change and/or alter their meaning. Iconotropy is a key concept in religious history, particularly for periods in which religious changes, often turbulent, took place. In addition, the iconotropic process of appropriating cult images brought with it changes in the materiality of those images. Numerous accounts from antiquity, the middle ages and the modern period detail how cult images were involved in such processes of misinterpretation, both symbolically and materially. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual culture and religious history.