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 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

, 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,

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.

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 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 �ɟøɾɟ ˈkɛpɛʃ(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,

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,

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 has published a systematic comparative history in which various patterns of their emergence, stabilization and diffusion are identified.See Klaus Hentschel
''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, 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 Gunthert
Gil Bartholeyns
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.

References

External links

''Journal of Visual Culture''

''Publisher's Website''

''Visual Studies'' journal

''Culture Visuelle'' social media

viz.: Rhetoric, Visual Culture, Pedagogy

William Blake and Visual Culture: A Special Issue of the Journal ''Imagetext''
* Material collection from

', 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 Studies @ University of California, Santa Cruz

Contemporary International Visual Culture

Visual Culture and Communication @ Zurich University of the Arts

Sciences et Cultures du Visuel @ University of Lille

''Master SCV''
{{DEFAULTSORT:Visual Culture Cultural studies