The Politics of Pictures is a history of looking, from Aristotle to TV audiences, from the invention of photography to the meaning of picnics, from Leviathan to synchronized swimming, Dr Johnson to the sexualization of war. John Hartley's wide-ranging and sometimes bizarre journey of discovery looks for the public in the realm of media, where citizens are now literally represented on screen and page. The book investigates popular media reality by showing how pictures and texts are powerful political forces in their own right, using a variety of primary texts to explore the way publics have...