If, How, and When an Image Can Be Said to Be Atmospheric

The paper questions the atmospheric scope of images. First, it aims to critically discuss the enthusiastic excesses of the so-called iconic turn, showing both its relatively lim-ited novelty compared to other phases of culture and the current risks of aesthetic manipulation. Secondly, it examines briefly some traditional ideas on iconic atmospher-ics, and in more detail, what could be the iconic atmospheric generators, referring to both perceptual images and artificial-artistic ones. The identified generators (vagueness, distance, ephemerality, foggy, twilightness) suggest that the image is more powerfully atmospheric when it blurs the boundaries of reality, subverts the teleology of clarity em-bedded in its representational function, thus triggering a felt-bodily resonance that is not antagonistic but based on a certain balance between contraction and expansion.