Image Text Music

On the unique meaning-making of image-text art

In a series of textual and photographic essays, writer and editor Catherine Taylor explores our encounters with the intersection of the visual and the verbal. Taylor riffs on and subverts Roland Barthes’ classic 1977 essay collection, Image Music Text, using his title as a playful point of departure for her thinking about the nature of image-text works and the music being made at their intersection.

Taylor rejects overarching statements about medium or genre in favor of observing the particular to reveal broader ways of reading that are both familiar and disorientating. These reflections are at once critical and celebratory, dystopian and utopian, investigative and contemplative, didactic and dreamlike. They are imaginings of the world which ask: as we shuttle between linguistic and visual modes of meaning-making, what is the purpose of reinventing forms if not to reinvent ways of living?

The author of You, Me, and the Violence, Apart and Giving Birth, Catherine Taylor (born 1964) is a founding editor of Essay Press, and an associate professor in writing at Ithaca College, where she codirects the Image Text MFA. She is also a codirector of ITI Press.