About the Book

"Against the disposable rapidity demanded by digital media, Szendy emphasizes the labor and time required for images to develop and come into view"--

Book Synopsis

A new, ecological approach to images by a renowned philosopher

When Susan Sontag first proposed the idea of an "ecology of images," she meant it as an exhortation to be vigilant against the vast surplus of pictures threatening our ability to truly see. Today, beyond the deep anxieties over a diminishing attention economy, concern focuses on the environmental cost of storing and circulating the digital images that confront us with unprecedented speed.

Against the disposable rapidity demanded by digital media, Peter Szendy emphasizes the labor and time required for images to develop and come into view. This inquisitive essay takes us from mimicry in the animal kingdom to the history of the shadow, Pliny's story about the birth of painting to Nabokov's butterflies, the first use of slo-mo in film to the first aerial photograph.

Review Quotes

"Peter Szendy is a dazzlingly original philosopher, as witty as he is erudite. For an Ecology of Images finds him at the height of his powers, as he outlines what he calls the 'shadows' of our future."
--Adam Shatz, author of The Rebel's Clinic

"Wide-ranging across the history of science, visual arts, and photography, this short book packs a lot in. Szendy understands the Kabbalistic principle that moving one letter can alter the universe: cosmicomic is cosmiconic, economy is iconomy, ecology is icology. He has shown us how to swim when we are all drowning in pictures."
--John Durham Peters, co-author of Promiscuous Knowledge

"This book made me feel wild reverence, joy, and wonder for everything Szendy looks at--like a six-year-old who, having just learned about sharks, corners you to tell you about "the coolest thing in the world.""
--Our Favorite Books of 2025, The Paris Review

About the Author

Peter Szendy is David Herlihy Professor of Humanities and Comparative Literature at Brown University. His many books include The Supermarket of the Visible; Hits: Philosophy in the Jukebox; Kant in the Land of the Extraterrestrials; and All Ears: The Aesthetics of Espionage.

Translator Marco Roth is a cofounder of n+1 and the author of The Scientists: A Family Romance.