1Conceived as an “open encyclopedia”, this work, published by Hazan in 2013 and co-edited by the University of Paris-Diderot, is the result of collective work carried out for nearly fifteen years by a group of teacher-researchers and doctoral students associated with the Research Laboratory on Anglophone Cultures (UMR 8225). Five years after its publication, this book is both a landmark and a reference in the field of Americanist studies in France. We find there, introduced and applied for the first time in a work in French on the visual history and culture of the United States, the model of critical thinking developed by the representatives of “Visual Studies” to study objects historically and culturally. designed and built to be seen and the practices with which they are associated. However, America in Pictures is not meant to be a manual of visual studies. Indeed, the objective pursued by the project managers (François Brunet, Didier Aubert, Géraldine Chouard, Anne Crémieux and Jean Kempf) is above all to bring critical and theoretical approaches into play from an interdisciplinary perspective, such as the indicate the “reading tracks” indicated at the end of each of the twenty-four thematic sections that structure the work.
2The book project sprouted from the desire to clarify and develop the somewhat incomplete and schematic perception of American images in France, influenced in part by art historians, especially concerned with the history of representations and their analysis. stylistic and in part, from Bonald to Goncourt and to Duhamel, by the contemptors of “America-image”, a melting pot of visual simulacrum and techno-industrial philistinism (Roger, 2002; Buffet, 2018). To break with this “vague metaphysics” (7), the authors of the work have decided to take, so to speak, the evil at the root. Starting from the observation that in the United States, more than in other industrial societies, the development of images is “marked by a strong immersion of representations in the economy and society” (9), they propose to study the forms and practices of the image, understood in the double sense of a material object (picture) and mental or imaginary representation (image), focusing above all on the practical infrastructure (economic, technological, social and political) that underlies its circulation or dissemination. As we can imagine, the whole difficulty, once this objective had been defined, was to develop a narrative structure which could serve as a critical tool or as a “focal point” making it possible to trace the mechanisms (production, reception, dissemination) which “lead from material objects to mental and imaginary representations, and register these in public space, material objects, social and economic exchanges ”(8). In other words, to bring to light the structuring elements which characterize the circulation of images, their meaning and their ideological value, all things essential to tell, but difficult to illustrate, at least by isolated images.
3This approach sheds light on the arrangement of the work in the form of a montage where the images not only illustrate the presentations and analyzes of the authors, but also compose autonomous visual narratives which are either clearly delimited by the material composition of the book. (this is the case, for example, of the “picture books” which are inserted in each of the six main chapters between the general introduction and the four thematic presentations-analyzes which follow), that is to say, and it is there one of the great successes of this publication, are reconstructed by the reader in the course of his discovery of the work. Thus, to the interaction between macro history and micro history dictated by the chronothematic progression of the whole, a third dynamic is added, obeying a primarily visual logic, which allows the reader to situate the economy of images in mechanisms of long duration. The effectiveness of this dynamic depends above all on the will of the authors to account for the plurality of American images without however the infinite diversity of the visual hindering the clear and immediate understanding of the story. In other words, if it was a question of making choices, it was just as important not to give in to the iconocentric, even honorary temptation. Part of the solution has, it seems, consisted in illustrating the multiplicity of visual forms by juxtaposing, without concern for hierarchization, but conversely by favoring a circulation by horizontal capillarity, artistic masterpieces and popular imagery. .
4If this choice goes a little against the strategy usually implemented for publications falling within the editorial format chosen for this work (that of the “beautiful book”), it does, on the other hand, make it possible to effectively shed light on prejudices and others. unequivocal accounts of American images. For example, in the section devoted to the colonial heritage, François Specq explains that the famous painting, by Benjamin West, Penn’s Treaty with the Indians (1771-72), was the subject, on both sides of the Atlantic, of innumerable reproductions engraved on a multitude of supports during the following century. In 1826, it was thus reproduced by the sign painter and Quaker pastor Edward Hicks against the background of a biblically inspired canvas, The Peaceful Kingdom, itself reproduced through engraving on a host of objects. Beyond the obvious ideological bias, this interaction testifies to the liveliness of the circulation between learned and popular practices which pave the way for the democratization of the image at a time that a tenacious myth has long held to be resistant to images.
5The idea, put forward in this example, that production by copy and recycling is an original regime of creation of images in the United States constitutes the main line of the work. If the absence of established institutions and the remoteness of original works explain the recourse to copying in nascent America, this practice asserted itself from the phase of “Americanization” of the image (1840-1900), to the point of becoming “the cultural expression specific to a society that recognizes itself in the greatest number and mobility” (76). However, according to a cliché that is also tenacious (probably inherited from Tocqueville), the copy imitates, at best perfects, but it does not create. Through the synthetic presentations and monographic essays that punctuate the book, the authors demonstrate that, on the contrary, from the portraits of Washington made by Stuart Gilbert, to the “rehash” of images of the West and even to digital images, “l The history of images in the United States has always been driven by the economy of reproduction – luxurious or mediocre, perfect or imperfect, faithful or unfaithful, servile or offbeat – rather than pure production ”(365).
6We may regret that the terms “reproduction” or recycling ”are sometimes used in a somewhat vague manner. On the contrary, we salute the concern for semantic precision which dictates other analyzes, for example that of the modalities of “citation work” in the section devoted to art since the 1950s. By emphasizing the diversity of the “metamorphosis operations” implemented by pop art artists and those of “neo” or “post” expressionism, Catherine Marcangeli and Penny Starfield demonstrate the need to approach these images, still too widely regarded as “ industrial ”, in a fine way (“ from work to work, from image to image and from film to film ”) from intermedial or intericonical approaches which are not all equivalent. This semantic consideration aside, we note in all the analyzes that make up the work a desire to reveal what happens between copies, this long chain of invisible actions whose understanding is the best guarantee of critical knowledge of the history of images in the United States.
7The last part of the book further encourages this critical approach by proposing to read the phenomena linked to the economy of copying and hybridization in the current era (1990-2010) in relation to two major trends, the dialectic of concentration and emancipation that accompanies the circulation of images and the critique of the “power” and the “truth” of images, both amplified by the digital revolution and bringing issues of power and counter-power within reach now globalized. These lines of thought, which complete the argumentative line of the work without closing it off, demonstrate that the “Americanity” of images is not the product of any “cultural essentialism”, but of visual forms and practices. which are both original and bearers of globalizing models.
8This idea, deployed over nearly four hundred pages through texts and images, in clear language, by the twenty-two specialists who collaborated on the book, makes America in Pictures a reference now essential for Americanist studies while remaining accessible to a wider public. The methodological approach favored by the authors can, moreover, serve as a pedagogical model to pursue the investigation of American visual forms and practices in other thematic avenues and / or by using imagery that has not been addressed in this book (like comics or pornography, for example). We could also imagine digital developments for this publication, such as the construction of maps or tables allowing to visualize differently the mechanisms underlying the existence of images.
9However, we will retain above all from this work the form of critical gaze that it encourages and which makes it possible to better make sense of images that would otherwise remain scattered objects, often attractive, but not obvious to interpret. We could thus start again from the famous poster “Hope” produced by Shepard Fairey for the presidential campaign of Barak Obama in 2008 and summoned by François Brunet in the introduction to bring the subject of the book. This “copy of copy of copy”, where the memory of Abraham Lincoln is mixed with the Soviet iconography, was recently recycled, among other things, in an image where the figure of Donald Trump replaced that of Obama and the word “Nope” to “Hope”. Everyone will be free to follow JWT Mitchell who sees in this surprising reversal the sign of the “bipolar alternation” of hope and fear which, according to the theorist of visual studies, characterizes American political culture. On the other hand, this image undoubtedly testifies that the construction of the identity of the American nation stems from complex mechanisms that this work illuminates and invites us to better decipher.
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