We accept that images are an integral part of our lives to a point where we decode them in a quasi-automatic manner. We have been trained to recognize and understand representations of all kinds and we increasingly have a comfortable familiarity with the visual .

Ralph Eugene Meatyard, IUntitled, (Boy with Flag), 1969

Deconstructionist criticism is responsible for a cultural turn that has helped redefine the status of culture. Whereas cultural phenomenon was previously seen as the mere response to social, political and economic processes, now it has now come to be perceived as having a life of its own.

Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Untitled, ("Motion Sound" Landscape), 1969

If modernism believed the image of the past to be a trace of reality, a form through which the past could be reexperienced and memories relived, postmodernism allows no such easy resting. .The relationship of images to the past has become problematic and the role of the image in producing memory and allowing for forgetting is central to this shift.

The origin of this change toward an ironic view of the past and its representations can be seen to have been given its most symptomatic invocation in Theodor Adorno's famous statement that "To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. Adorno's statement, with its implication that the horror of the Holocaust made aesthetic representation deeply problematic, has haunted theoretical work about the conflict of memory and history and of fact and fiction in relationship to the Holocaust.