Introduction

Abstract

In the era of fake news, truthiness, reality creation and widespread cynicism and disaffection about images and how they are presented, an examination of the role of visual media of all kinds and their relation to truth is timely. This collection traces continuities between the aesthetic, ethical, and political questions raised by traditional visual media and shows how new visual media have reshaped these questions and raised new ones for spectators, artists, and theorists, as well as different aesthetic affordances, ethical challenges, and political potential. The chapters investigate the interrelations between aesthetics, ethics, and politics in a variety of visual media forms ranging across art installations, Facebook Live, film and television, both narrative and documentary, Instagram, painting, photography, video games, and interactive documentaries. They explore how different ethical questions, political implications, and aesthetic pleasures arise and shape one another in particular ways in distinct visual media. The themes include the use of cinema as a medium for ethical and political thought, how documentary subjects and artworks both conceal and reveal truth, how art can work to enact and further reparation, new ethical questions arising from interactive media, such as documentary, the role of images in responding to political events and trauma, and the particular manifestations of political relationships as a result of recent transformations in the production, distribution, and reception of various media forms....