Visual culture

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Visual culture is a field of study that generally includes some combination of cultural studies, art history, and anthropology, by focusing on aspects of culture that rely on visual images. Among cultural studies theorists working with contemporary culture, this often overlaps with film studies, Psychoanalytic theory and the study of television, although it can also include video game studies, comics, traditional artistic media, advertising, the Internet, and any other medium that has a crucial visual component.

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 onfrom Jacques Lacan's theorization of the unconscious gaze.

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, Bracha Ettinger 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 Hamburger, and S. Brent Plate.

Several major universities now either house or are developing graduate programs in Visual Studies. They include: Coventry University, Duke University, University of Wisconsin, Madison, University of Rochester, University of California, Irvine, University of California, San Diego, University of California, Santa Cruz, University of Southern California, State University of New York, Buffalo, Goldsmiths College, University of London, University of East London, Kingston University, New York University, Middlesex University, Chinese University of Hong Kong, University of Art and Design Helsinki, Pori Department of Art and Media, University of Copenhagen, University of Pennsylvania, University College, London and the University of Lisbon. Cornell University has been offering both undergraduate and graduate degrees in Visual Studies for the past 5 years.

Northern Illinois University offers programs in studying visual culture in art education at the undergraduate, graduate, and doctorate levels. The university of limerick, ireland offers under graduates the option to study modules in visual cultural studies.

See also

• Art education
• Art history
• Media influence
• Mediascape
• Visual anthropology
• Visual rhetoric
• Visual literacy
• Visual arts
• Visual ethics
• Gaze
• Sublime

Further reading (Books)

• Dikovitskaya, Margaret (2005 (cloth), 2006 (paperback)). Visual Culture: The Study of the Visual after the Cultural Turn. 1st ed., Cambridge, Ma: The MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-04224-X.
• Fuery, Kelli & Patrick Fuery (2003). Visual Culture and Critical Theory. 1st 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.
• Mirzoeff, Nicholas (ed.) (2002). The Visual Culture Reader. 2nd 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., Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-531440-9.

External links

• Journal of Visual Culture
• 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

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