Taking the fall of the Berlin Wall as a key marker in recent history - a period in which increasingly we find ourselves watching 'instant history' unfold live on air - the book presents a new critical concept of image critique: a double procedure of both a critique of images and the use of images as a means to engage with our contemporary mediated culture for new critical purposes. A rich array of primary sources are woven together to provide a thorough critique of the recent and lively theoretical debates about visual culture. Topics range from Francis Fukuyama's End of History thesis to metapictures, contemporary East German film and the notion of the public sphere/screen. In staking out a new critical visual theory, the book does not seek to present any straightforward analysis of visual representations of the fall of the Wall, but instead inhabits its historical and ongoing resonance as a means to situate a complex interactive account of history, politics, human action, freedom, the media and visual culture.

Sunil Manghani is reader in critical and cultural theory and director of doctoral research at the Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton. He is an associate editor for Theory Culture & Society and an editorial board member for the Journal of Contemporary Painting. He is the author of Image Studies: Theory and Practice (Routledge, 2013) and Image Critique & the Fall of the Berlin Wall (Intellect, 2008); co-author of Barthes/Burgin (Edinburgh University Press, 2016); editor of the fourvolume anthology Images: Critical and Primary Sources (Bloomsbury, 2013); and co-editor of Images: A Reader (Sage, 2006), an anthology of writings on the image from Plato to the present, and Painting: Critical and Primary Sources (Bloomsbury, 2015). He is also co-editor of Farewell to Visual Studies? (Penn State University Press, 2015), which is the final volume in the Stone Summer Theory Institute series, produced by School of the Art Institute of Chicago.