SEEING IS BELIEVING is a personal and analytical account investigating the politics of visual communication. Several thousand times a day we assimilate visual imagery at speed, a process accelerated in the digital world. Photographic imagery is the most dominant form of image production and the immediate and evident meaning that it imparts contributes to the assumptions society lives with and relies on. The book explores the complex and reciprocal dynamic between world and image in this most visually mediated society. Everyone 'knows' images can be false or deceptive, but we all live and work in constant denial of this idea and its implications. In a world saturated with media we act as though we are immune to their effects. A pervasive image system crosses the globe, reiterating authorized narratives that relate events deceptively. The symbolic order connects with a social order and they constantly reinforce and renew one another. SEEING IS BELIEVING combines analysis with narrative of individual experience, it is an invitation to an intimate voyage that is permeable to the world's upheavals. ?It is from the tension between these two poles ? autobiographical fiction and documentary report ? that poetry is generated? (Jean-Luc Godard). This book explores the potential for contemporary forms of artistic practice to create new spaces for active participation in culture and society. There are five central sections investigating the nature of imagery: History / Politics; Art / Culture; Film / Television; Products / Possessions; The Quotidian / the Strange. Throughout the book there are clusters of images exploring differentiated themes of pictorial operation including photography, graffiti, painting, film and television. The sections are formed of fragments, disposable typologies, which offer a provisional and permeable incision into the image flow. The book concludes with an essay on Verisimilitude and Delusion. AUTHOR: Dr Rod Stoneman is Director of the Huston School of Film ADigital Media, Galway, Ireland. He was Chief Executive of the Irish Film Board until September 2003 and previously a Deputy Commissioning Editor in the Independent Film and Video Department at Channel 4 Television in the United Kingdom. He is the author of Chavez: The Revolution Will Not Be Televised; A Case Study of Politics and the Media and the co-editor of 'The Quiet Man'? and Beyond: Reflections on a Classic Film, John Ford and Ireland and Scottish Cinema Now. SELLING POINTS: ? SEEING IS BELIEVING: THE POLITICS OF THE VISUAL is a reader investigating the politics of visual communication and the way we process this information. ? SEEING IS BELIEVING explores the complex and reciprocal dynamic between the world and the image in our visually mediated society. ? The book combines analysis with narrative of individual experience and explores the idea of false imagery, the relationship between symbolic order and social order and the changing nature of this dynamic in the digital world. ? SEEING IS BELIEVING is structured around five sections: History and Politics; Art and Culture; Film and Television; Products and Possessions; The Quotidian and the Strange. ? The subjects are explored visually using photography, graffiti, painting, film and television stills' making this a thorough and aesthetically varied review of society. ILLUSTRATIONS: 200 colour eb/w illustrations
