The Rustling Image begins from a historical juncture: when global news networks could not report from within the Syrian revolution, millions of low-resolution mobile-phone videos recorded by activists and citizen journalists became records of protest and war. Blurred, pixelated, unstable, and unverifiable, these images challenged expectations of clarity, authority, and evidentiary certainty.
Using the Syrian revolution as a case study rather than a bounded subject, the book develops an account of visual uncertainty. It shifts attention from the forensic effort to verify events toward examining how images operate when clarity cannot be secured. Drawing on twentieth-century theories of ambiguity and the limits of representation, it examines how such theories illuminate twenty-first-century digital witnessing, in which images circulate rapidly while their meanings remain unsettled and continually deferred.
When images fail to reveal what they were intended to prove, attention turns to how they resonate. “Rustling images” designates a mode of visual-listening attuned to both surface and sound. As these raw images enter archives, documentary practices, and contemporary art, the book traces their transformation from shock-images into pensive-images that invite reflection and poetic association. By attending to how unstable images resonate, the book treats uncertainty as a condition of vigilant witnessing in which meaning remains unsettled, keeping alive the possibility of imagining images still to come.
