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Visual Culture
The Reader


August 1999 | 512 pages | SAGE Publications Ltd

"This collection of classic essays in the study of visual culture fills a major gap in this new and expanding intellectual field. Its major strength is its insistence on the importance of three central aspects of the study of visual culture: the sign, the institution and the viewing subject. It will provide readers, teachers and students with an essential text in visual and cultural studies." - Janet Wolff, University of Rochester

Visual Culture: The Reader provides an invaluable resource of over 30 key statements from a wide range of disciplines. Although underpinned by a focus on contemporary cultural theory, this reader puts issues of visual culture and the rhetoric of the image at centre stage.

Divided into three parts, The Culture of the Visual, Regulating Photographic Meaning, Looking and Subjectivity, this reader enables students to make hitherto unmade connections across art, film and photography history and theory, semiotics, history, semiotics and communications, media studies, and cultural theory. The key statements are from the work of:

Visual Culture: The Reader sets the agenda for the study of Visual Culture and will be an essential sourcebook for researchers and students alike.

sets the agenda for the study of Visual Culture and will be an essential sourcebook for researchers and students alike.

This is the reader for the module The Image and Visual Culture (D850) - part of The Open University Masters in Social Sciences Programme. 


Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall
What is Visual Culture?
 
PART ONE: CULTURES OF THE VISUAL
Jessica Evans
Introduction
 
A: Rhetorics of the Image
Norman Bryson
The Natural Attitude
Roland Barthes
Rhetoric of the Image
Victor Burgin
Art, Common Sense and Photography
Roland Barthes
Myth Today
 
B: Techniques of the Visible
Michel Foucault
Panopticism
Walter Benjamin
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Susan Sontag
The Image-World
Guy Debord
Separation Perfected
Dick Hebdige
The Bottom Line on Planet One
Squaring up to The Face

 

 
PART TWO: REGULATING PHOTOGRAPHIC MEANINGS
Jessica Evans
Introduction
 
C: Theorizing Photography
Simon Watney
On the Institutions of Photography
Pierre Bourdieu
The Social Definition of Photography
Allan Sekula
Reading an Archive
Photography between Labour and Capital

 
Rosalind Krauss
Photography's Discursive Spaces
 
D: Institutions and Practices in Photography
Douglas Crimp
The Museum's Old, the Library's New Subject
Abigail Solomon-Godeau
Living with Contradictions
Critical Practices in the Age of Supply-Side Aesthetics

 
John Tagg
Evidence, Truth and Order and A Means of Surveillance
Jessica Evans
Feeble Monsters
Making Up Disabled People

 
Don Slater
Marketing Mass Photography
 
PART THREE: LOOKING AND SUBJECTIVITY
Stuart Hall
Introduction
 
E: Theoretical Perspectives
Louis Althusser
Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses
Sigmund Freud
Fetishism
Otto Fenichel
The Scoptophilic Instinct and Identification
Kaja Silverman
The Subject
Elizabeth Cowie
Fantasia
Homi K Bhabha
The Other Question
The Stereotype and Colonial Discourse

 
 
F: Gendering the Gaze
Laura Mulvey
Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema
Jackie Stacey
Desperately Seeking Difference
Jane Gaines
White Privilege and Looking Relations
Race and Gender in Feminist Film Theory

 
Jacqueline Rose
Sexuality in the Field of Vision
 
G: `Seeing' Racial Difference
Frantz Fanon
The Fact of Blackness
Mary Louise Pratt
Alexander von Humboldt and the Reinvention of America
Kobena Mercer
Reading Racial Fetishism
The Photographs of Robbert Mapplethorpe

 
Mary Ann Doane
Dark Continents
Epistemologies of Racial and Sexual Difference in Psycholanalysis and the Cinema

 
Richard Dyer
White

Essential seminal reading.

Professor Beschara Karam
Department of Communicatin Science, University of South Africa
August 12, 2014

Used as supplementary reading to support sessions on visual culture and the imperial gaze.

Dr Anna Bocking-Welch
School of History, Liverpool University
November 11, 2013

This is a comprehensive and exciting collection of essays in the field of visual culture. However, the essays are too advanced for a textbook for a first year class, even though they would serve as a great resources. As such, I have put Visual Culture: A Reader on the recommended reading list, and have request a copy for the library.

Dr Susan Pell
Department of Humanities, Social Sciences and Communications, Richmond, The American Int'l University in London
November 12, 2012

Brings together many diverse writings relating to the subject and provides the student and teacher with an invaluable resource. Great foundation text in the subject of visual culture.

Ms Sinead Wall
Photography and Art, Westport College of Further Education
November 9, 2012

Visual Culture: The Reader is a comprehensive collection of essays by top scholars. It is well written and the structure of the book is clear and easy to use in course design work. To be used as obligatory reading in my course it is too broad, for visual culture is only one of the main topics in the class. However, I am going to recommend it as a source for students' course essays, and it may be the main source for those students who decide to write about visual culture. I will also recommend the book for their masters' theses. I consider the book as a valuable source for many kind of culture-related studies.

Mrs Annamari Huovinen
Center for the Doctoral Program, Aalto University
December 8, 2011

A basic text that I recommend to any student who seeks to gain an understanding of visual culture and its development. It is not easy to read for bachelor level students at our uni. But fitting for those who want to pursue the topic of convergence culture and esp visual culture. It is significant because it enables students to connect disciplinary fields and, hopefully, to reflect on what images do to us and just how they do it.

Dr Lisbeth Frolunde
Dept of Comm, Business & Info Tech, University of Roskilde
July 26, 2011

Excellent compendium of classic texts in one location.

Dr Christopher Wilson
Architecture, Izmir University of Economics
July 19, 2011

This is a highly impressive edition of this reader which has become a classic in the field. The essays in this book range from the canonical to the contemporary. I do think that some of the chapters have been over anthologised, so perhaps future editions could consider removing works such as Benjamin's Laura Mulvey's as these appear in virtually every reader.

Dr Paul Elliott
IHCA, Worcester University
July 12, 2011

Excellent publication providing the key texts on visual culture. While many readers provide texts, this one seems to be able to focus on the most relevant ones, without being too narrow.

Mr Eric Erbacher
American Studies , University of Paderborn
March 25, 2011
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