Christian Ferencz-Flatz, “Image Consciousness in the Age of Street Advertising”, in: Regina-Nino Mion, Claudio Rozzoni, John B. Brough (eds.), Husserl on Depiction, Routledge, 2025.
This chapter takes Husserl’s theory of image consciousness and especially the important role that his considerations on the picture frame play in this regard as an opportunity for sketching out some elements for a phenomenology of advertisements. In doing so, it aims to historicize Husserl’s conception, which is indeed remarkably indifferent to the historic transformations of the ways images are produced and received. By confronting Husserl’s interpretation with examples of contemporary advertisements, the chapter arrives at showing how each of the three aspects referred to by Husserl as defining elements of image consciousness: the image-thing, the image object and the image subject, as well as the picture frame itself, which mediates between them, need to be thoroughly reinterpreted in order to properly account for the phenomenon.