The September 2010 issue of Visual Resources is the first of two dedicated to Helene E. Roberts' scholarly contributions.  The issues, edited by Julie Codell, are divided among topics to which Roberts contributed during her career and in her writings: the art press and photography in the first issue and collecting and iconography in the second. In 1993 in Visual Resources Roberts noted that most of us learn about art from “surrogate images” and their verbal descriptions called ekphrasis. Roberts observed that our first view of a reproduction of a work of art is often the most lasting, and she echoed Jean Baudrillard's notion of the simulacrum, the sign that replaces the real thing of which it is the sign.

This first issue (26, no. 3) dedicated to Roberts focuses on ideas about reproductions, simulacra, Marshall McLuhan's notions, and recent theories of mediology. Reproductions are not always cases of lost auras, as Walter Benjamin argued, but acquire new auras, as reflected in Roberts' studies of surrogate or “second hand” images that acquire a new reality, apart from any “original” art they recall and which we may or may not ever see. Thus, images of artworks are like other material objects with which we create a complex enclosing environment of things we cherish and wish to remember.