Our issues in 2016 carry the same title: The Flexible Image. They examine the (photographic) image as it expands into two distinct yet related directions: the image as text/sign and the image as operation. In this issue, PART II, we ponder the image as text. Inspired by Aperture’s issue Lit., we ask whether the image has taken over from the word, and if gestures are in turn replacing images. This is something that Nancy Newhall wrote about in Aperture’s first issue, back in 1952: ‘Perhaps the old literacy of words is dying and a new literacy of images is being born. Perhaps the printed page will disappear and even our records [will] be kept in images and sounds.’

This issue includes a conversation with Nicholas Muellner and Catherine Taylor from the Image Text initiative – on your suggestion, Lucas – and Taylor agrees with Newhall’s statement that ‘photograph-writing’ might become ‘the form through which we shall speak to each other, in many succeeding phases of photography, for a thousand years or more’. And, like Newhall, she concedes the continuing importance of text, saying, ‘The association of words and photographs has grown into a medium with immense influence on what we think, and, in the new photograph-writing, the most significant development so far is in the caption.’ This summer saw the new Photo-Text Award at Les Rencontres d’Arles, rewarding the best book combining images and texts, which suggests that we’re likely to see more work in this genre in the time to come. Lucas, could you describe your relationship to images and text? - Nina Strand, editor