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Hans Belting, An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. 208 pp.
Human beings make images. From prehistoric cave paintings to digital photographs, a succession of artifacts attests to this remarkably sustained human activity. Indeed, it might be said that as an activity unique to our species, making images makes human beings. The traces we have leftover time in the form of images constitute the subject of the history of art. But might they not also be within the purview of anthropology? This position is the underlying premise of Hans Belting's An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body, published originally in Germany as Bild- Anthropologie in 2001 by Verlag Wilhelm Fink, Munich.
Prompted in part by the increasing technological basis of the image in our age, Belting sets out to establish an anthropological perspective as a way to avoid the risk of "reducing images to mere artifacts of technology" (15). He predicates his undertaking on a specific definition of the image. Whereas we commonly consider the image as something that can be seen, Belting broadens the parameters to allow images a different identity. Spanning "the boundary between physical and mental existence" (2), the image "may live in a work of art" without necessarily coinciding with it. Belting defines the image this way in order to extend our consideration beyond the artifacts produced by specific media to encompass those images-"dreams, imaginings, personal perceptions"-that we generate corporeally. His central proposition is that "image, body and medium" ground "every attempt at picture-making" (3).
Belting conceives of a medium as the material or tangible transfer point of images. Images rely on media to be manifest, but, in his terms, they are not reducible to their technical support. When he states "pictures have always been dependent on a given medium, whether it was a lump of clay or the smooth wall of a cave," Belting makes a conventional observation. However, he wants to differentiate his use of the word medium to specify something that "conveys or hosts an image" (18). Furthermore, Belting includes our bodies within his definition of a medium; because they process, receive, and transmit images, they qualify as "a living medium" (5). This allows him to take into consideration memory, dreams, and imagination....