Image Text Music

by Catherine Taylor

Image Text Music by writer and editor Catherine Taylor is a series of textual and photographic essays that explore our encounters with the place where the visual meets the verbal. Taylor riffs on and subverts Roland Barthes’ classic 1977 essay collection, Image Music Text, using his title as playful points of departure for her thinking about the nature of image-text works and the music that might be made at their intersection.

These meditative and analytical essays pose vital questions about the psychological and political possibilities for image-text works. Taylor rejects overarching statements about medium or genre in favour of observations of the particular to reveal broader ways of reading that are at once familiar and disorientating.

The reflections in Image Text Music are at once critical and celebratory, dystopian and utopian, investigative and contemplative, didactic and dreamlike. They are visions of visions of the world that ultimately ask: as we shuttle between linguistic and visual modes of meaning-making, what is the purpose of reinventing forms if not to reinvent ways of living?

Featuring artwork by Laia Abril, Lucas Blalock, Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Tony Cokes, Gustave Courbet, Sara Cwynar, Robert Frank, Nan Goldin, Francisco Goya, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Whitney Hubbs, Justine Kurland, Édouard Manet, Pietro Monaco, Nicholas Muellner, Ahndraya Parlato, Adrian Piper, Man Ray, Martha Rosler, and Wolfgang Tillmans

Genres: Essays, Art, Nonfiction

190 pages, Paperback

Published July 1, 2022

Reviews

[Minnie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I spent a good month really connecting with this, reading parts of it aloud, annotating, etc. really exciting to me, the convergence of self aware, funny, relatable, pseudo fiction and intellectual theory and almost advice. The stirring of desire, image text relationships, wanting wanting wanting. Important to me. Feels like there’s another essay waiting to be written in the same vein , building on Taylor’s work , looking at how our relationships with text image couples with social media.

[Faye-Linn Van Dillen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Zo zo zo goed

Mega aanrader voor iedereen geïnteresseerd in phonetics, eropoetics & linguistic bodieeesssss

‘Language is a skin: i rub my language against the other. My language trembles with desire…’

[Elida · Rating 5 out of 5]

It has been a while since I’ve read a book that has felt as though it was speaking to me intimately. It condenses the allure of the philosophy of medias — image, text, music — and shows us how they interweave as she interweaves them in our front of our eyes. It is weighty with meaning but lighthearted, fun, playful and oh so yummy.

[kari trail · Rating 4 out of 5]

loved so many parts of this but whooah also grasping at straws to understand much of the philosophy refs here… i can’t wait to reread when i am smarter ha ha

i feel like i haven’t read many things that really focus on feeling ruled or entranced by the music playing at the intersection of image and text (and the confusion of what to do with it !) she writes about the endless blanket tug between “seduction and spur to action” with an almost desperate curiosity, ultimately throwing up hands to ask if “this infatuation with images and texts might lead to something more than just the dizziness of enchantment, trance, intensity, and a kind of catatonic escape.”

i loved when she included little narrative bits, pseudo-fictionalized interactions with philosophers and this cool slippery worldbuilding. sometimes it got too deep in the referential trenches for me tbh and i started reading the same paragraph four times in a row (lol). but much to think on! much to learn!

[Cléo · Rating 4 out of 5]

super helpful for context

[sho · Rating 5 out of 5]

five stars for theresa hak kyung cha mention

[vamann · Rating 4 out of 5]

the entire day while i was reading this book i felt as if i was riding a rollercoaster of conceptual slippage. loved it but it was a straight up bizarre thing to read.