The Lives of Images, Vol I: Repetition, Reproduction, Circulation

The Lives of Images, edited by Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, is a set of contemporary thematic readers designed for educators, students, practicing photographers, and others interested in the ways images function within a wider set of cultural practices. The series tracks the many movements and “lives” of images—their tendency to accumulate, circulate, and transform through different geographies, cultures, processes, institutions, states, uses, and times.

Volume 1 of the series, Repetition, Reproduction, and Circulation, addresses the multiple life cycles of the image—its modes of dispersion, reception, consumption, and aggregation—and the significance of technological reproduction for contemporary forms of social, cultural, and political life. The image is considered as both a tool for liberation and a means of repression within the evolving structures of modern life. The essays consider the implications of the nature and effect of the reproducible image on the categories, shapes, and aims of contemporary art and society. Further grounded by two interviews with practitioners in the field, Repetition, Reproduction, and Circulation promises to be an accessible, rigorous, and timely resource for all students, educators, and practitioners of photography.

Contributions by Giorgio Agamben, Kate Palmer Albers, Erika Balsom, Aria Dean, Jodi Dean, Cora Gilroy-Ware, Boris Groys, Miriam Bratu Hansen, Rabih Mroué, and Hito Steyerl

Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa is a photographer, writer, and graduate director of the photography MFA program at the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence. He is the author of a book of selected essays, Dark Mirrors (2021); and his most recent photographic publication, Hiding in Plain Sight (coauthored with fellow artist Ben Alper), was published by the Harun Farocki Institute in summer 2020. His work was recently exhibited at the International Center of Photography, New York, and in the Biennale für aktuelle Fotografie, Mannheim, Germany. He has contributed essays to catalogues and monographs by Rosalind Fox Solomon, George Georgiou, Paul Graham, Steve McQueen, and Vanessa Winship. Wolukau-Wanambwa has guest edited The Photobook Review and written for Aperture, FOAM, and for both the Barbican and the Photographers’ Gallery, London. He was an artist-in-residence at Light Work, Syracuse, New York, in 2015.

Paul Pfeiffer, a multimedia artist working in video, photography, sculpture, and sound, attended the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program. In 2003, the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago organized a traveling survey exhibition of his work and the accompanying publication, Paul Pfeiffer. He was the first recipient of the Bucksbaum Award at the Whitney Biennial in 2000; in 2011, he was a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.

Batia Suter is an artist who frequently works with found images in site-specific installation, as well as bookmaking, photo-animation, and collage. She published the artist books Parallel Encyclopedia (2007) and Parallel Encyclopedia #2 (2016), for which she was shortlisted for the 2018 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize. Her other publications include Surface Series (2011), Radial Grammar (2018), and Hexamiles (Mont-Voisin) (2019).