In contemporary society the obsession with image and style overrides function and substance. Stuart Ewen, in All Consuming Images: the Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture, examines the preoccupation with image and style and its implications. The book, which Ewen started writing in 1983, was first published in 1988 with a new edition published in 1999. In the new Introduction to the 1999 edition, Ewen comments that it is remarkable that the book needed so few changes from its original text, considering that a style is generally short-lived and transient. He attributes the bookÆs continued relevance to ôthe fact that it was written during a time when now-familiar elements of todayÆs image-gripped culture were in the process of becoming apparentö (xvi).
Ewen has excellent credentials to author this kind of study. He is Professor and Chairman of the Department of Film and Media Studies at Hunter College in New York, and a Professor in the Ph.D. Programs in History and in Sociology at the City University of New York Graduate Center. A frequent lecturer, he has authored many other books on the media as a force in American cultural life.
All Consuming Images is best viewed as a cultural history book in the sense that it uses the past to look at the present, such as the development of mercantile trade in the Middle Ages in the chapter on ôGoods and Surfaces.ö EwenÆs methodology includes first-hand reports by his college students on the power and meaning of style in their lives, books on the topic of communication and the culture of images. The book is divided into four parts: In the MindÆs Eye, Image and Identity, Image and Power in a Changing World, and The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture, as well as a Conclusion of the Political elements of style, and excellent notes, bibliography and index.
In the original Introduction to the book, Ewen discusses the major idea of the book: the question of style is ôlin...