Visual culture is the aspect of
culture
Culture () is an umbrella term which encompasses the social behavior, institutions, and norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, customs, capabilities, and habits of the individuals in these groups ...
expressed in
visual images. Many academic fields study this subject, including
cultural studies,
art history
Art history is the study of aesthetic objects and visual expression in historical and stylistic context. Traditionally, the discipline of art history emphasized painting, drawing, sculpture, architecture, ceramics and decorative arts; yet today ...
,
critical theory,
philosophy,
media studies,
Deaf Studies, and
anthropology
Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including past human species. Social anthropology studies patterns of be ...
.
The field of visual culture studies in the United States corresponds or parallels the ''Bildwissenschaft'' ("image studies") in Germany.
Both fields are not entirely new, as they can be considered reformulations of issues of photography and
film theory that had been raised from the 1920s and 1930s by authors like
Béla Balázs
Béla Balázs (; 4 August 1884 in Szeged – 17 May 1949 in Budapest), born Herbert Béla Bauer, was a Hungarian film critic, aesthetician, writer and poet of Jewish heritage. He was a proponent of formalist film theory.
Career
Balázs was th ...
,
László Moholy-Nagy
László Moholy-Nagy (; ; born László Weisz; July 20, 1895 – November 24, 1946) was a Hungarian painter and photographer as well as a professor in the Bauhaus school. He was highly influenced by constructivism and a strong advocate of the ...
,
Siegfried Kracauer
Siegfried Kracauer (; ; February 8, 1889 – November 26, 1966) was a German writer, journalist, sociologist, cultural critic, and film theorist. He has sometimes been associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory. He is notable for a ...
and
Walter Benjamin
Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin (; ; 15 July 1892 – 26 September 1940) was a German Jewish philosopher, cultural critic and essayist.
An eclectic thinker, combining elements of German idealism, Romanticism, Western Marxism, and Jewish ...
.
Overview
Among theorists working within contemporary culture, this field of study often overlaps with
film studies
Film studies is an academic discipline that deals with various theoretical, historical, and critical approaches to cinema as an art form and a medium. It is sometimes subsumed within media studies and is often compared to television studies.
...
,
psychoanalytic theory,
sex studies,
queer theory, and the
study of television; it can also include
video game studies,
comics,
traditional artistic media,
advertising
Advertising is the practice and techniques employed to bring attention to a product or service. Advertising aims to put a product or service in the spotlight in hopes of drawing it attention from consumers. It is typically used to promote a ...
, the
Internet
The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...
, and any other medium that has a crucial
visual
The visual system comprises the sensory organ (the eye) and parts of the central nervous system (the retina containing photoreceptor cells, the optic nerve, the optic tract and the visual cortex) which gives organisms the sense of sight (th ...
component.
The field's versatility stems from the range of objects contained under the term "visual culture", which aggregates "visual events in which information, meaning or pleasure is sought by the consumer in an interface with visual technology". The term "visual technology" refers any media designed for purposes of perception or with the potential to augment our visual capability.
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. In an interview with the ''
Journal of Visual Culture
The ''Journal of Visual Culture'' is a triannual peer-reviewed academic journal that covers the field of visual arts. The editor-in-chief is Marquard Smith (Royal College of Art). It was established in 2002 and is published by Sage Publications.
...
'', academic
Martin Jay
Martin Evan Jay (born May 4, 1944) is an American intellectual historian whose research interests connected history with the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, social theory, cultural criticism, and historiography.
He is currently the Sid ...
explicates the rise of this tie between the visual and the technological: "Insofar as we live in a culture whose technological advances abet the production and dissemination of such images at a hitherto unimagined level, it is necessary to focus on how they work and what they do, rather than move past them too quickly to the ideas they represent or the reality they purport to depict. In so doing, we necessarily have to ask questions about ... technological mediations and extensions of visual experience."
"Visual Culture" goes by a variety of names at different institutions, including Visual and Critical Studies, Visual and Cultural Studies, and Visual Studies.
Pictorial Turn
In the development of Visual Studies,
WJT Mitchell's text on the "Pictorial Turn" was highly influential. In analogy to the
linguistic turn
The linguistic turn was a major development in Western philosophy during the early 20th century, the most important characteristic of which is the focusing of philosophy and the other humanities primarily on the relations between language, langua ...
, Mitchell stated that we were undergoing a major paradigm shift in sciences and society which turned images, rather than verbal language, to the paradigmatic vectors of our relationship to the world.
Gottfried Boehm
Gottfried Boehm (; born 1942) is a German art historian and philosopher.
Life
Boehm studied art history, philosophy and German in Cologne, Vienna and Heidelberg. He obtained his ''Promotion'' (doctorate) in philosophy in 1968 and his ''Habili ...
made similar claims in the German-speaking context, when talking about an "iconic turn"., as did Marshall McLuhan when speaking of television in terms of creating an "intensely visual culture"
Visualism
The term "Visualism" was developed by the German anthropologist
Johannes Fabian Johannes Fabian (born 19 May 1937) is an emeritus professor of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. His ethnographic and historical research focuses on religious movements, language, work, and popular culture in the Katanga Province, Shaba m ...
to criticise the dominating role of vision in scientific discourse, through such terms as
observation. He points to an under theorised approach to the use of visual representation which leads to a corpuscular theory of knowledge and information which leads to their atomisation.
Relationship with other areas of study
Art history
As visual culture studies, in the United States, have begun to address areas previously studied by
art history
Art history is the study of aesthetic objects and visual expression in historical and stylistic context. Traditionally, the discipline of art history emphasized painting, drawing, sculpture, architecture, ceramics and decorative arts; yet today ...
, there have been disputes between the two fields.
[Pinotti, Somaini (2016) ''Cultura visuale'', pp.67-8] One of the reason for controversy was that the various approaches in art history, like
formalism
Formalism may refer to:
* Form (disambiguation)
* Formal (disambiguation)
* Legal formalism, legal positivist view that the substantive justice of a law is a question for the legislature rather than the judiciary
* Formalism (linguistics)
* Scie ...
,
iconology
Iconology is a method of interpretation in cultural history and the history of the visual arts used by Aby Warburg, Erwin Panofsky and their followers that uncovers the cultural, social, and historical background of themes and subjects in the visu ...
,
social history of art
The history of art focuses on objects made by humans for any number of spiritual, narrative, philosophical, symbolic, conceptual, documentary, decorative, and even functional and other purposes, but with a primary emphasis on its aesthetics, ae ...
, or
New Art History, focused only on artistic images, assuming a distinction with non-artistic ones, while in visual culture studies there is typically no such distinction.
Performance studies
Visual culture studies may also overlap with another emerging field, that of
performance studies
Performance studies is an interdisciplinary academic field that uses performance as a lens and a tool to study the world. The term ''performance'' is broad, and can include artistic and aesthetic performances like concerts, theatrical events, ...
. As "the turn from art history to visual culture studies parallels a turn from theater studies to performance studies", it is clear that the perspectival shift that both emerging fields embody is comparable.
Image studies
While the image remains a focal point in visual culture studies, it is the relations between images and consumers that are evaluated for their cultural significance, not just the image in and of itself.
Martin Jay
Martin Evan Jay (born May 4, 1944) is an American intellectual historian whose research interests connected history with the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, social theory, cultural criticism, and historiography.
He is currently the Sid ...
clarifies, "Although images of all kinds have long served as illustrations of arguments made discursively, the growth of visual culture as a field has allowed them to be examined more in their own terms as complex figural artifacts or the stimulants to visual experiences."
Likewise,
W. J. T. Mitchell explicitly distinguishes the two fields in his claim that visual culture studies "helps us to see that even something as broad as the image does not exhaust the field of visuality; that visual studies is not the same thing as image studies, and that the study of the visual image is just one component of the larger field."
''Bildwissenschaft''
Though the development of ''
Bildwissenschaft'' ("image-science") in the
German-speaking world
This article details the geographical distribution of speakers of the German language, regardless of the legislative status within the countries where it is spoken. In addition to the German-speaking area (german: Deutscher Sprachraum) in Europe, ...
to an extent paralleled that of the field of visual culture in the United Kingdom and United States, ''Bildwissenschaft'' occupies a more central role in the
liberal arts
Liberal arts education (from Latin "free" and "art or principled practice") is the traditional academic course in Western higher education. ''Liberal arts'' takes the term '' art'' in the sense of a learned skill rather than specifically th ...
and
humanities
Humanities are academic disciplines that study aspects of human society and culture. In the Renaissance, the term contrasted with divinity and referred to what is now called classics, the main area of secular study in universities at the t ...
than that afforded to visual culture. Significant differences between ''Bildwissenschaft'' and Anglophone cultural and visual studies include the former's examination of images dating from the
early modern period, and its emphasis on continuities over breaks with the past. Whereas Anglo-American visual studies can be seen as a continuation of
critical theory in its attempt to reveal power relations, ''Bildwissenschaft'' is not explicitly political. WJT Mitchell and Gottfried Boehm have had a discussion about these potential differences in an exchange of letters
History
Early work on visual culture has been done by
John Berger
John Peter Berger (; 5 November 1926 – 2 January 2017) was an English art critic, novelist, painter and poet. His novel '' G.'' won the 1972 Booker Prize, and his essay on art criticism '' Ways of Seeing'', written as an accompaniment to the ...
(''
Ways of Seeing
''Ways of Seeing'' is a 1972 television series of 30-minute films created chiefly by writer John Berger and producer Mike Dibb. It was broadcast on BBC Two in January 1972 and adapted into a book of the same name.
The series was intended as a ...
'', 1972) and
Laura Mulvey
Laura Mulvey (born 15 August 1941) is a British feminist film theorist. She was educated at St Hilda's College, Oxford. She is currently professor of film and media studies at Birkbeck, University of London. She previously taught at Bulmershe ...
(''
Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema'', 1975) that follows on from
Jacques Lacan's theorization of the unconscious
gaze
In critical theory, sociology, and psychoanalysis, the gaze (French ''le regard''), in the philosophical and figurative sense, is an individual's (or a group's) awareness and perception of other individuals, other groups, or oneself. The concept ...
. Twentieth-century pioneers such as
György Kepes
György Kepes ˆÉŸÃ¸É¾ÉŸ ˈkÉ›pɛʃ(October 4, 1906 – December 29, 2001) was a Hungarian-born painter, photographer, designer, educator, and art theorist. After immigrating to the U.S. in 1937, he taught design at the New Bauhaus (later the S ...
and
William Ivins, Jr. as well as iconic phenomenologists like
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Maurice Jean Jacques Merleau-Ponty. (; 14 March 1908 – 3 May 1961) was a French phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. The constitution of meaning in human experience was his main interest an ...
also played important roles in creating a foundation for the discipline. For the history of art,
Svetlana Alpers
Svetlana Leontief Alpers (born February 10, 1936) is an American art historian, also a professor, writer and critic. Her specialty is Dutch Golden Age painting, a field she revolutionized with her 1984 book ''The Art of Describing''. She has also ...
published a pioneering study on ''The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century'' (Chicago 1983) in which she took up an earlier impulse of
Michael Baxandall to study the visual culture of a whole region of early-modern Europe in all its facets: landscape painting and perception, optics and perspectival studies, geography and topographic measurements, united in a common ''mapping impulse''.
Major works on visual culture include those by
W. J. T. Mitchell,
Griselda Pollock
Griselda Frances Sinclair Pollock''The International Who's Who of Women''; 3rd ed.; ed. Elizabeth Sleeman, Europa Publications, 2002, p. 453 (born 11 March 1949) is an art historian and cultural analyst of international, postcolonial feminist stud ...
Giuliana Bruno Stuart Hall,
Roland Barthes
Roland Gérard Barthes (; ; 12 November 1915 – 26 March 1980) was a French literary theorist, essayist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. His work engaged in the analysis of a variety of sign systems, mainly derived from Western popula ...
,
Jean-François Lyotard
Jean-François Lyotard (; ; ; 10 August 1924 – 21 April 1998) was a French philosopher, sociologist, and literary theorist. His interdisciplinary discourse spans such topics as epistemology and communication, the human body, modern art and ...
,
Rosalind Krauss
Rosalind Epstein Krauss (born November 30, 1941) is an American art critic, art theorist and a professor at Columbia University in New York City. Krauss is known for her scholarship in 20th-century painting, sculpture and photography. As a criti ...
,
Paul Crowther
Paul Crowther (; born 24 August 1953) is an English philosopher. He is a professor of philosophy and author specialising in the fields of aesthetics, metaphysics, and visual culture. He has written nine books in the field of History of Art a ...
and
Slavoj Žižek. Continuing work has been done by
Lisa Cartwright,
Marita Sturken,
Margaret Dikovitskaya,
Nicholas Mirzoeff
Nicholas Mirzoeff is a visual culture theorist and professor in the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. He is best known for his work developing the field of visual culture and for his many books and his widely u ...
,
Irit Rogoff
Irit Rogoff is a writer, theorist, teacher and curator. Her research interests include visual culture; contemporary art and critical theory; postcolonialism, geoculture, and geographies, cultures of education and gender. Rogoff obtained her PhD ...
and
Jackie Stacey. The first book titled Visual Culture (Vizuális Kultúra) was written by
Pál Miklós in 1976.
For history of science and technology,
Klaus Hentschel
Klaus Hentschel (born 4 April 1961) is a German physicist, historian of science and Professor and head of the History of Science and Technology section in the History Department of the University of Stuttgart. He is known for his contributions in ...
has published a systematic comparative history in which various patterns of their emergence, stabilization and diffusion are identified.
[See ]Klaus Hentschel
Klaus Hentschel (born 4 April 1961) is a German physicist, historian of science and Professor and head of the History of Science and Technology section in the History Department of the University of Stuttgart. He is known for his contributions in ...
''Visual Cultures in Science and Technology - A Comparative History''
Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press 2014.
In the German-speaking world, analogous discussions about "Bildwissenschaft" (image studies) are conducted, a.o., by Gottfried Boehm,
Hans Belting
Hans Belting (born 7 July 1935 in Andernach, Rhine Province) is a German art historian and theorist of medieval and Renaissance art, as well as contemporary art and image theory. He was born in Andernach, Germany, and studied at the universities ...
, and Horst Bredekamp. In the French-speaking world, the visual culture and the visual studies have been recently discussed, a.o., b
Maxime Boidy André GunthertGil Bartholeyns
Visual culture studies have been increasingly important in religious studies through the work of
David Morgan, Sally Promey,
Jeffrey F. Hamburger
Jeffrey F. Hamburger (born 1957) is an American art historian specializing in medieval religious art and illuminated manuscripts. In 2000 he joined the faculty of Harvard University, where in 2008 he was appointed the Kuno Francke Professor of ...
, and S. Brent Plate.
See also
*
Art education
Visual arts education is the area of learning that is based upon the kind of art that one can see, visual arts
The visual arts are art forms such as painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, ceramics, photography, video, filmmaking, de ...
*
Art history
Art history is the study of aesthetic objects and visual expression in historical and stylistic context. Traditionally, the discipline of art history emphasized painting, drawing, sculpture, architecture, ceramics and decorative arts; yet today ...
*
Asemic writing
*
Media influence
In media studies, mass communication, media psychology, communication theory, and sociology, media influence and the media effect are topics relating to mass media and media culture's effects on individual or an audience's thoughts, attitudes, and ...
*
Mediascape
Global cultural flow involves the flow of people, artifacts, and ideas across national boundaries as result of globalization.Tzanelli, Rodanthi. 2011. "âCultural Flows€™." In ''Encyclopaedia of Consumer Culture'', edited by D. Southerton. Sage.CQ ...
*
Sublime
*
Visual anthropology
Visual anthropology is a subfield of social anthropology that is concerned, in part, with the study and production of ethnographic photography, film and, since the mid-1990s, new media. More recently it has been used by historians of science a ...
*
Visual communication
*
Visual ethics
*
Visual literacy
Visual literacy is the ability to interpret, negotiate, and make meaning from information presented in the form of an image, extending the meaning of literacy, which commonly signifies interpretation of a written or printed text. Visual literacy ...
*
Visual rhetoric
Visual rhetoric is the art of effective communication through visual elements such as images, typography, and texts. Visual rhetoric encompasses the skill of visual literacy and the ability to analyze images for their form and meaning. Drawing on ...
*
Visual sociology
Visual sociology is an area of sociology concerned with the visual dimensions of social life.
Theory and method
Visual sociology can be theoretically framed around three themes. Luc Pauwels suggests that the framework is based on the origin ...
References
Further reading
*
* Alloa, Emmanuel; Cappelletto, Chiara (eds.), ''Dynamis of the Image. Moving Images in a Global World'', New York: De Gruyter, 2020.
*
*
* Bartholeyns, Gil (ed.) (2016), ''Politiques visuelles'', Dijon: Presses du réel, with a French translation of the Visual Culture Questionnaire (''October'' 1996) by Isabelle Decobecq. .
* Berger, John (1972). ''Ways of Seeing''. London: BBC and Penguin. ISBN 9780563122449.
* Conti, Uliano (2016), Lo spazio del visuale. Manuale sull'utilizzo dell'immagine nella ricerca sociale, Armando, Roma,
*
*
*
*
*
Oliver Grau
Oliver Grau (born 24 October 1965) is a German art historian and media theoretician with a focus on image science, modernity and media art as well as culture of the 19th century and Italian art of the Renaissance. Main Areas of Research are: Dig ...
: ''Virtual Art. From Illusion to Immersion.'' MIT-Press, Cambridge/Mass. 2003.
*
Oliver Grau
Oliver Grau (born 24 October 1965) is a German art historian and media theoretician with a focus on image science, modernity and media art as well as culture of the 19th century and Italian art of the Renaissance. Main Areas of Research are: Dig ...
, Andreas Keil (Hrsg.): ''Mediale Emotionen. Zur Lenkung von Gefühlen durch Bild und Sound''. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2005.
*
Oliver Grau
Oliver Grau (born 24 October 1965) is a German art historian and media theoretician with a focus on image science, modernity and media art as well as culture of the 19th century and Italian art of the Renaissance. Main Areas of Research are: Dig ...
(Hrsg.): ''Imagery in the 21st Century''. MIT-Press, Cambridge 2011.
*
Klaus Hentschel
Klaus Hentschel (born 4 April 1961) is a German physicist, historian of science and Professor and head of the History of Science and Technology section in the History Department of the University of Stuttgart. He is known for his contributions in ...
:
Visual Cultures in Science and Technology- A Comparative History'', Oxford, Oxford Univ. Press, 2014. .
*
*
* Jay, Martin (ed.), 'The State of Visual Culture Studies', themed issue of ''Journal of Visual Culture'', vol.4, no.2, August 2005, London:
Sage
Sage or SAGE may refer to:
Plants
* ''Salvia officinalis'', common sage, a small evergreen subshrub used as a culinary herb
** Lamiaceae, a family of flowering plants commonly known as the mint or deadnettle or sage family
** ''Salvia'', a large ...
. . e
*
*
*
*
* Plate, S. Brent, ''Religion, Art, and Visual Culture''. (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan
Palgrave Macmillan is a British academic and trade publishing company headquartered in the London Borough of Camden. Its programme includes textbooks, journals, monographs, professional and reference works in print and online. It maintains off ...
, 2002)
* 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.
* Yoshida,Yukihiko, ''Leni Riefenstahl and German Expressionism: A Study of Visual Cultural Studies Using Transdisciplinary Semantic Space of Specialized Dictionaries'', Technoetic Arts: a journal of speculative research (Editor Roy Ascott),Volume 8, Issue3,intellect,2008
*
External links
''Journal of Visual Culture''''Publisher's Website''''Visual Studies'' journal''Culture Visuelle'' social media viz.: Rhetoric, Visual Culture, PedagogyWilliam Blake and Visual Culture: A Special Issue of the Journal ''Imagetext''* Material collection from
', by Professor Martin Irvine
Visual Culture CollectiveDuke University Visual Studies InitiativeVisual Studies @ University of HoustonInternational Visual Sociology AssociationVisual Studies @ University of California, IrvineCentre for Visual & Cultural Studies, Edinburgh College of Art, ScotlandVisual Studies @ University of California, Santa CruzContemporary International Visual CultureVisual Culture and Communication @ Zurich University of the ArtsSciences et Cultures du Visuel @ University of Lille''Master SCV''
{{DEFAULTSORT:Visual Culture
Cultural studies