The Technical Image is the English translation of Das technische Bild: Kompendium zu einer Stilgeschichte wissenschaftlicher Bilder (published in 2008; the German edition was reviewed in this journal, (2009) 42(4), by Mirjam Brusius). The Technical Image slightly updates the German-language original with some revised chapters, some new chapters, and a thematic bibliography adapted to anglophone scholars. However, the book's key value comes from offering a window, long overdue, onto the work of Das technische Bild. The discussions of this important and vibrant research group have previously been largely inaccessible to non-germanophone historians such as myself. Thanks are due to the Bard Graduate Center, who cooperated with the University of Chicago Press to bring this translation into being.

A ‘re-review’ of this new translation is worthwhile, I think, because research into scientific visual cultures is moving very quickly and this edition enters a field that has expanded rapidly even since 2008. I would also, however, like to emphasize an aspect of The Technical Image that was not fully addressed by Brusius's review in 2009. This book is not just a sampler for some excellent studies of scientific visual culture, but a methodological handbook that formulates general strategies and theories for interpreting technical ‘image-making’. The authors and editors attempt to systematize diverse disciplinary research techniques into focused lines of enquiry. This endeavour makes The Technical Image fresh and useful amongst scholarship that can sometimes be rather diffusely interdisciplinary. It also makes the book very useful for historians of science who are approaching visual sources for the first time, for art historians who are tackling technical imaging for the first time, and for teaching.

With the model of a methodological textbook in mind, the book is structured into four key parts. The introductory chapters outline the general aims and methods of the research group. These are followed by ten case studies that address deliberately diverse types of image and image-contexts, from seventeenth-century natural-history illustrations to the design of WYSIWYG desktop computing. Interleafing the case studies are historiographical glossaries of terms that have become important to the group. These are drawn from both art history (‘iconological analysis’ or ‘tableaux’) and the history and philosophy of science (‘objectivity and evidence’ or ‘diagrammatics’). The problems of attempting to unify disciplinary discourses is evident from the structure itself – after making my way through three different methods chapters I still wasn't entirely sure what their aim was, but the case studies gradually deepened my understanding of the larger ‘project’ and very convincingly demonstrated its merit.

Which project, then? The Technical Image pushes strongly against the idea of images as ‘illustration’. It aims to interrogate visual culture performatively and to uncover how visualization acts in scientific imagination, notation and the construction of communities. Approaching visual sources as performative could now be seen as a commonplace strategy, but the book focuses on what is probably the most challenging of these strands: how visual material influences scientific thought.

The project's philosophical bent reveals itself in a generosity towards the image-makers. We are encouraged to attack the problem of how images ‘do’ things in science by sympathetically thinking through the problems inherent to ‘fashioning the visible’. Several of the case studies explore the difficulty of stabilizing the role of stuff (the instruments, graphic media and human beings) in the processes of recording data. Particularly illuminating in this respect is the chapter by Stefan Ditzen. This study considers negotiations of trust in vision by early microscopic observers. Ditzen demonstrates how to read that negotiation in their published graphic output. In the observers’ engravings we can identify instances where they variously chose to pin faith to their own abilities, did (or did not) have faith in their lenses, or instead elected to privilege existing data circulated by other observers. A second important strand of analysis in the book considers the process by which images and practices emerge as iconic and become exemplary for wider groups and communities. This is the emphasis in a study of early X-ray photographs of human bodies (Vera Dünkel) and another of scanning tunnelling microscopy (Jochen Hennig).

The case studies also set a direction – by example rather than explicitly – in two important ways. The first of these is the breadth of the group's understanding of visual culture, beginning ‘once natural objects evince even minimal traces of human manipulation’ (p. 10). This breadth requires a very pragmatic recognition of the disposability of images. Images that are treasured and hoarded are only a fraction of a much wider technical ‘image-world’. This kicks, quite refreshingly, against a tendency amongst historians of science to be a little over-enchanted by their visual sources. Second is the multidimensional manner in which the case studies examine the role of images in technical processes. They demonstrate that we can ask, simultaneously, how visual material serves to advance the conceptual, perceptual and ergonomic demands of a particular technical process.

The problems of unifying vocabulary (indeed generating vocabulary) to talk succinctly about non-verbal epistemologies have not been put to rest by The Technical Image. Even translation of the key term ‘style’ is difficult, since the group's use of this word is largely determined by the German Bildwissenschaft tradition, with an inflection of Ludwig Fleck's ‘thought-styles’. This ambiguity is discussed but not satisfactorily closed. The use of a singular article ‘A’ (History of Styles) in the subtitle is also a little confusing; it might read better as ‘Style in the History of Scientific Imagery’. Working through this group's attempt to design and enact a method is nonetheless very enlightening. I very much hope that reception of this book will encourage more translations of the scholarship from Das technische Bild.