Looking Outside The Castle: The Corporate Image in Visual Media

Corporations create images and avatars which work to bolster an idea in the public consciousness that they have personal identities which are knowable, likeable, even folksy. We all know and understand the meaning or character of 'Mickey Mouse', 'Colonel Sanders', or 'Ronald McDonald'. These images are as familiar to us as any image can be. Yet most of us could not say how this happened, or when. Henrietta Ashworth places this odd sleight of hand alongside a history of the corporation and American identity while also examining how images such as these are used, both subversively and otherwise, in visual culture, and the extent to which it is possible to oppose or subvert the corporate agenda by means of film, either narrative or documentary. In so doing, 'Looking Outside The Castle' examines the ways in which visual culture is informed, interpellated and unavoidably influenced by the narratives that large corporations write for themselves, and asks 'can we ever step outside the magic castle and see it as it really is? Or must our view be forever obscured by its walls?'