Image Control
Art, Fascism, and the Right to Resist
by Patrick Nathan
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Pub Date Aug 17 2021 | Archive Date Aug 17 2021
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Description
Images come at us quickly, often without context. A photograph of Syrian children suffering in the wake of a chemical attack segues into a stranger’s pristine Instagram selfie. Before we can react to either, a new meme induces an LOL and a share. While such constant give and take might seem innocent, even entertaining, this barrage of content numbs our ability to examine critically how the world, broken down into images, affects us. Images without context isolate us, turning everything we experience into mere transactions. It is exactly this alienation that leaves us vulnerable to fascism—a reactionary politics that is destroying not only our lives and our nations, but also the planet’s very ability to sustain human civilization.
Who gets to control the media we consume? Can we intervene, or at least mitigate the influence of constant content? Mixing personal anecdotes with historical and political criticism, Image Control explores art, social media, photography, and other visual mediums to understand how our culture and our actions are manipulated, all the while building toward the idea that if fascism emerges as aesthetics, then so too can anti-fascism. Learning how to ethically engage with the world around us is the first line of defense we have against the forces threatening to tear that world apart.
Advance Praise
“Eloquent, angry, smart, and wildly erudite, Patrick Nathan sits down in the middle of the intersection where American loneliness, capitalism, fascism, the tyranny of the image, and the commodification of absolutely everything all meet and crash together into the disaster that we call home. Image Control is a call to arms, an urgent plea for a radically queered compassion, one that knows how—and who—to fight.” —Ben Ehrenreich, author of Desert Notebooks
"Image Control is brilliant in so many ways, but perhaps the most valuable insight I encountered in Nathan's superbly written collection of essays is the knowledge that humans might begin to take control over the images they consume. We do not have to live in vacuums; we do not have to flatten the individual. Instead, we have the power to resist, to contextualize, to place other human beings within time and narrative. Image Control is a gift to those in search of enlightenment within this frightening hall of mirrors we call social media." —Garrard Conley, author of Boy Erased
"In Image Control, Patrick Nathan exposes the authoritarian underpinnings of presumed neutrality in art, photographic documentation, and memorials to underscore the importance of language as a tool for anti-fascist analysis. Elegantly weaving between art and literary criticism, historical and cultural commentary, Nathan offers a hybrid practice of resistance blending philosophical investigation with an indictment of the ways consumerism, gentrification, and assimilation undermine the possibilities for challenging tyranny. With fierce wit and uncommon scrutiny, Nathan urges us to refuse the flattening lure of image-as-truth in order to pursue an incisive autonomy." —Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of The Freezer Door
Available Editions
| EDITION | Hardcover |
| ISBN | 9781640094536 |
| PRICE | $26.00 (USD) |
| PAGES | 240 |
