By Where Words and Images Meet

Why do we put bookplates in books in our personal libraries? Why do we keep photographs? How do popular illustrated journals and magazines function? Bringing together a fascinatingly diverse yet closely related group of subjects, Where Words and Images Meet encourages us to think about all this and much, much more: it asks us to rethink what we know about words and images and how they interact. From 19th Century frontispieces to Soviet photo scrapbooks, from the relationships between portraits and biographies to museum labels, the book’s richly illustrated chapters by established scholars in a range of interrelated fields open up historically specific relationships between word and image to collective examination and fruitful analysis. The chapters deliberately foreground both topics that have previously been overlooked as well as disciplinary approaches outside those most familiarly associated with word and image, to offer a stimulating and carefully developed framework to look at the relationship afresh. Where Words and Images Meet opens up for analysis and reflection the forms of attention, practices, skills and assumptions that underlie visual interpretation and meaning-making in the writing of history. By bringing the features of the materials we read and look at into focus, we can grasp more effectively the complex interrelationships involved, and enhance our practice and understanding.