2005 Chapters (Layout Features)

Preface to the Polish Edition of "The Power of Images"

Freedberg, David A.

The original edition of The Power of Images appeared in 1989, a few months before the fall of the old regimes of Central and Eastern Europe. In the Preface to the French edition of 1998, I noted that everywhere regime change was accompanied by the destruction and removal of images. If ever the subject of iconoclasm, for so long neglected by students of the history of art and images, seemed relevant to the role of images in our daily lives, it was then. Although this seemed clear enough at the time, the implications of that extraordinary conjunction of politics and the power of images could not yet be fully appreciated. But ever since 1989, and especially since the opening of the new century, public and private responses to images have stood at the center of both our political and our personal lives.