Book excerpt: This broad-ranging text offers a comprehensive outline of how visual images, language and discourse work as `systems of representation'. Individual chapters explore: representation as a signifying practice in a rich diversity of social contexts and institutional sites; the use of photography in the construction of national identity and culture; other cultures in ethnographic museums; fantasies of the racialized `Other' in popular media, film and image; the construction of masculine identities in discourses of consumer culture and advertising; and the gendering of narratives in television soap operas.