Iconographies of power : the politics and poetics of visual representation Today the question of iconography has taken on a new and more general urgency. As a dominant cultural practice iconography embraces the politics as well as the poetics of visual representation within their specific historical and cultural conditions. In its contemporary significance the question of iconography moreover reaches beyond disciplinary boundaries of conventional definitions and interpretations of the relation between words and images in a demand to critically compare and contrast their different iconographies as cultural practices of power. In their distinct arguments and from different perspectives the essays collected in this volume are all similarly concerned with the iconographical power and poetics of the image including a broad range of visual representations: prints and illustrations painting sculpture and concept art documentary and art photography film comedy and digital imagery. In all these instances the image is looked at not as an exclusive and isolated phenomenon but rather emphatically as a visual and contextual event; as both the source and target of the collision and the collusion of word and image; as instances and symptoms of contemporary iconographic practice alike