I began writing these chapters while in quarantine in Sydney, having flown there from the United States on May 25, 2020, anticipating my usual three months stay. The strict lockdown conditions due to the pandemic meant that for the first 2 weeks I was confined to a hotel room, no argument, no exceptions, no problem. I had resolved to devote the coming days to revisiting an idea I have, for decades, taken as a given but never had time to think through: that the visual imagery so pervasive in contemporary life might exhibit definable structures, elusive and changeable but consistently so, just enough for its histories to be written and its emerging shapes perceived. I already had a name for this economy of images: iconomy, a simple combination of the Greek words for “icon” and “economy.” Like several others who have used this term before and since, I foolishly thought that I had coined it. I was thinking about how certain buildings, then dubbed “iconic architecture,” stood as symbols of cities within a worldwide chain of such images, how they operated within tourist economies and broader public imaginaries. The other side of this seemingly benign coinage became apparent at a moment when widespread trauma was occasioned by a war of images, when many of these buildings became targets. My response to 9/11 was The Architecture of Aftermath, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2006.

But the broader logic within which the contest of images is fought kept on eluding an analysis fitting its growing importance. I carried with me to Sydney a small cache of books, among them Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle, the locus classicus for any thinking about the nature of image economies under capitalism. It would, I figured, be a familiar place from which to start over. Decades of thinking about these issues in the company of many others doing the same was my greatest resource. There was also Google Books, my University Library access to e-books and articles, and the many files I had on my laptop. As the plane took off, the prospect before me was a few weeks, with minimal distractions, to think more about iconomy, this plausible but fugitive idea.