Visual Culture as an academic subject is a field of study that generally includes some combination of cultural studies, art history, critical theory, philosophy, and anthropology, by focusing on aspects of culture that rely on visual images. Among theorists working within contemporary culture, this often overlaps with film studies, psychoanalytic theory, gender studies, queer theory, and the study of television; it can also include video game studies, comics, traditional artistic media, advertising, the Internet, and any other medium that has a crucial visual component. Because of the changing technological aspects of visual culture as well as a scientific method-derived desire to create taxonomies or articulate what the "visual" is, many aspects of Visual Culture overlap with the study of science and technology, including hybrid electronic media, cognitive science, neurology, and image and brain theory. It also may overlap with another emerging field, that of "Performance Studies." "Visual Culture" goes by a variety of names at different institutions, including Visual and Critical Studies, Visual and Cultural Studies, and Visual Studies.
Early work on visual culture has been done by John Berger (Ways of Seeing, 1972) and Laura Mulvey (Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, 1975) that follows on from Jacques Lacan's theorization of the unconscious gaze. Late nineteenth-century practitioners of visual knowledge, such as Georgy Kepes and William Ivins, as well as iconic phenomenologists like Maurice Merleau-Ponty also played a role creating a foundation for the discipline.
Major work on visual culture has been done by W. J. T. Mitchell, particularly in his books Iconology and Picture Theory and by the art historian and cultural theorist Griselda Pollock. Other writers important to visual culture include Stuart Hall, Jean-François Lyotard, Rosalind Krauss and Slavoj Zizek. Continuing work has been done by Lisa Cartwright, Margarita Dikovitskaya, Chris Jencks, Nicholas Mirzoeff and Gail Finney. Visual Culture studies have been increasingly important in religious studies through the work of David Morgan, Sally Promey, Jeffrey F. Hamburger, and S. Brent Plate.
See also
- Art education
- Art history
- Asemic writing
- Media influence
- Mediascape
- Visual anthropology
- Visual rhetoric
- Visual literacy
- Visual arts
- Visual ethics
- Gaze
- Sublime
- Visual Culture Caucus
- Visual sociology
- Visual Studies
- Visual communication
Further reading (Books)
- Dikovitskaya, Margaret (2005 (cloth), 2006 (paperback)). Visual Culture: The Study of the Visual after the Cultural Turn (1st ed. ed.). Cambridge, Ma: The MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-04224-X.
- Stuart Ewen (1988 (cloth), 1999 (revised paperback)). All Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture (1st ed. ed.). New York, NY: Basic Books. ISBN 978-0465001019.
- Fuery, Kelli & Patrick Fuery (2003). Visual Culture and Critical Theory (1st ed. ed.). London: Arnold Publisher. ISBN 0340807482.
- Jay, Martin (ed.), 'The State of Visual Culture Studies', themed issue of Journal of Visual Culture, vol.4, no.2, August 2005, London: Sage. ISSN 14704129. eISSN 17412994
- Mirzoeff, Nicholas (1999). An Introduction to Visual Culture. London: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-15876-1.
- Michael Ann, Holly & Moxey, Keith (2002). Art History, Aesthetics, Visual Studies (1st ed. ed.). Massachusetts: Clark Art Institute and Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-09789-1.
- Mirzoeff, Nicholas (ed.) (2002). The Visual Culture Reader (2nd ed. ed.). London: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-25222-9.
- Morra, Joanne & Smith, Marquard (eds.) (2006). Visual Culture: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies, 4 vols. London: Routledge. ISBN 0-41-532641-9.
- Plate, S. Brent, Religion, Art, and Visual Culture. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002) ISBN 0-312-24029-5
- Smith, Marquard, 'Visual Culture Studies: Questions of History, Theory, and Practice' in Jones, Amelia (ed.) A Companion to Contemporary Art Since 1945, Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. ISBN 9781405135429
- Sturken, Marita; Lisa Cartwright (2007). Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (2nd ed. ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-531440-9.
- Elkins, James (2003). Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction. New York: Routledge. ISBN 0-41-596681-7.
- Manghani, Sunil; Jon Simons, Arthur Piper (2006). Images: A Reader. London: Sage. ISBN 978-1412900454.
- Manghani, Sunil (2008). Image Critique. London: Intellect Books. ISBN 978-1841501901.
External links
- Journal of Visual Culture | Publisher's Website
- Visual Studies journal
- Kenyan Art Gallery
- viz.: Rhetoric, Visual Culture, Pedagogy
- William Blake and Visual Culture: A Special Issue of the Journal Imagetext
- Material collection from Introduction to Media Theory and Visual Culture, by Professor Martin Irvine
- Visual Culture Collective
- Duke University Visual Studies Initiative
- Visual Studies @ University of Houston
- International Visual Sociology Association
- Visual Studies @ University of California, Irvine
- Centre for Visual & Cultural Studies, Edinburgh College of Art, Scotland
- Visual Culture in Britain, Journal
- Visual Studies @ University of California, Santa Cruz
- Interfaces: Studies in Visual Culture book series
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