Images, History and Culture. Some current challenges

Abstract

The academic recognition of images as a cultural phenomenon is widely accepted today, even if the methods for analyzing them in the respective fields of study of the Humanities and Social Sciences continue to be the object of great debate due to the intersection of several disciplines that explain them in divergent ways. A historical perspective will allow us to understand not only the cultural position they have occupied but also the enormous frictions between the so-called «high culture» in which our academic culture is included, and the popular culture of the society of the masses, which through media formats such as photogravure and cinematography have shown visual aspects of the reality of their time to people who hardly needed to use the written text. The article also studies the processes of convergence that have taken place in the study of images and the displacements of the analysis of representations from the History of Art to other disciplines that have endowed their meanings with new perspectives and much more precise contexts. We analyze different positions in the analysis of the images and the need to provide the analysis of the images with a critical mechanism that also includes the historical times that are overlapped in each representation.