Visual culture is the aspect of

culture Culture ( ) is a concept that encompasses the social behavior, institutions, and Social norm, norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, Social norm, customs, capabilities, Attitude (psychology), attitudes ...

expressed in visual images. Many academic fields study this subject, including

cultural studies Cultural studies is an academic field that explores the dynamics of contemporary culture (including the politics of popular culture) and its social and historical foundations. Cultural studies researchers investigate how cultural practices rel ...

art history Art history is the study of Work of art, artistic works made throughout human history. Among other topics, it studies art’s formal qualities, its impact on societies and cultures, and how artistic styles have changed throughout history. Tradit ...

critical theory Critical theory is a social, historical, and political school of thought and philosophical perspective which centers on analyzing and challenging systemic power relations in society, arguing that knowledge, truth, and social structures are ...

philosophy Philosophy ('love of wisdom' in Ancient Greek) is a systematic study of general and fundamental questions concerning topics like existence, reason, knowledge, Value (ethics and social sciences), value, mind, and language. It is a rational an ...

media studies Media studies is a discipline and field of study that deals with the content, history, and effects of various media; in particular, the mass media. Media studies may draw on traditions from both the social sciences and the humanities, but it mos ...

Deaf Studies Deaf studies are academic disciplines concerned with the study of the deaf social life of human groups and individuals. These constitute an interdisciplinary field that integrates contents, critiques, and methodologies from anthropology, cultural ...

, and

anthropology Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, society, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including archaic humans. Social anthropology studies patterns of behav ...

. 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 Film theory is a set of scholarly approaches within the academic discipline of film or cinema studies that began in the 1920s by questioning the formal essential attributes of motion pictures; and that now provides conceptual frameworks for und ...

that had been raised from the 1920s and 1930s by authors like

Béla Balázs Béla Balázs (; 4 August 1884 – 17 May 1949), 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 the son of Simon Bauer a ...

László Moholy-Nagy László Moholy-Nagy (; ; born László Weisz; July 20, 1895 – November 24, 1946) was a Kingdom of Hungary, Hungarian painter and photographer as well as a professor in the Bauhaus school. He was highly influenced by Constructivism (art), con ...

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 ...

and

Walter Benjamin Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin ( ; ; 15 July 1892 – 26 September 1940) was a German-Jewish philosopher, cultural critic, media theorist, and essayist. An eclectic thinker who combined elements of German idealism, Jewish mysticism, Western M ...

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 film theory, theoretical, history of film, historical, and film criticism, critical approaches to film, cinema as an art form and a medium. It is sometimes subsumed within media stud ...

psychoanalytic theory Psychoanalytic theory is the theory of the innate structure of the human soul and the dynamics of personality development relating to the practice of psychoanalysis, a method of research and for treating of Mental disorder, mental disorders (psych ...

, sex studies,

queer theory Queer theory is a field of post-structuralist critical theory that emerged in the early 1990s out of queer studies (formerly often known as gay and lesbian studies) and women's studies. The term "queer theory" is broadly associated with the study a ...

, and the study of television; it can also include

video game studies Video is an electronic medium for the recording, copying, playback, broadcasting, and display of moving visual media. Video was first developed for mechanical television systems, which were quickly replaced by cathode-ray tube (CRT) system ...

comics a Media (communication), medium used to express ideas with images, often combined with text or other visual information. It typically the form of a sequence of Panel (comics), panels of images. Textual devices such as speech balloons, Glo ...

, traditional artistic media,

advertising Advertising is the practice and techniques employed to bring attention to a Product (business), product or Service (economics), service. Advertising aims to present a product or service in terms of utility, advantages, and qualities of int ...

, the

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the Global network, global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a internetworking, network of networks ...

, and any other medium that has a crucial

visual The visual system is the physiological basis of visual perception (the ability to detect and process light). The system detects, transduces and interprets information concerning light within the visible range to construct an image and buil ...

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 to 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 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 primarily on the relations between language, language users, and the world. ...

, 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 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 to criticise the dominating role of vision in scientific discourse, through such terms as

observation Observation in the natural sciences is an act or instance of noticing or perceiving and the acquisition of information from a primary source. In living beings, observation employs the senses. In science, observation can also involve the percep ...

. 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 reasons 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, 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. 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 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 William John Thomas Mitchell (born March 24, 1942) is an American academic. Mitchell is the Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago. He was the editor of ''Critical Inquiry'' for 42 ...

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 ''Bildwissenschaft'' is an academic discipline in the German-speaking world. Similar to visual studies, and defined in relation to art history, ''Bildwissenschaft'' (approximately, "image-science") refers to a number of different approaches to ima ...

'' ("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 Germanosphere () in Europe, German-speaking minorities are ...

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 () is a traditional academic course in Western higher education. ''Liberal arts'' takes the term ''skill, art'' in the sense of a learned skill rather than specifically the fine arts. ''Liberal arts education'' can refe ...

and

humanities Humanities are academic disciplines that study aspects of human society and culture, including Philosophy, certain fundamental questions asked by humans. During the Renaissance, the term "humanities" referred to the study of classical literature a ...

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 The early modern period is a Periodization, historical period that is defined either as part of or as immediately preceding the modern period, with divisions based primarily on the history of Europe and the broader concept of modernity. There i ...

, and its emphasis on continuities over breaks with the past. Whereas Anglo-American visual studies can be seen as a continuation of

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 t ...

('' Ways of Seeing'', 1972) and

Laura Mulvey Laura Mulvey (born 15 August 1941) is a British feminist film theorist and filmmaker. 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 ...

('' Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema'', 1975) that follows on from

Jacques Lacan Jacques Marie Émile Lacan (, ; ; 13 April 1901 – 9 September 1981) was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist. Described as "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Sigmund Freud, Freud", Lacan gave The Seminars of Jacques Lacan, year ...

's theorization of the unconscious

gaze In critical theory, philosophy, sociology, and psychoanalysis, the gaze (French: ''le regard''), in the figurative sense, is an individual's (or a group's) awareness and perception of other individuals, other groups, or oneself. Since the 20th ...

. Twentieth-century pioneers such as

György Kepes György Kepes (; 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 School of Design, t ...

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 interes ...

also played important roles in creating a foundation for the discipline. For the history of art,

Svetlana Alpers Svetlana Leontief Alpers (née Leontief; 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'' ...

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

Griselda Pollock Griselda Frances Sinclair Pollock (born 11 March 1949) is a British art historian, whose work focuses on analyzing visual arts and visual culture through global feminist and postcolonial feminist lenses. Since 1977, Pollock has been an influen ...

Giuliana Bruno
Stuart Hall,

Roland Barthes Roland Gérard Barthes (; ; 12 November 1915 – 25 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 popu ...

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 p ...

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 and

Slavoj Žižek Slavoj Žižek ( ; ; born 21 March 1949) is a Slovenian Marxist philosopher, cultural theorist and public intellectual. He is the international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London, Global Distin ...

. 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, for his widely-used textbook on the ...

, Irit Rogoff 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. He is the head of the University of Stuttgart's History of Science and Technology section of its History department. Life and work Born in Bad Nauhei ...

has published a systematic comparative history in which various patterns of their emergence, stabilization and diffusion are identified.See

''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 (7 July 1935 – 10 January 2023) was a German art historian and media theorist with a focus on image science, and this with regard to contemporary art and to the Italian art of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Biography Be ...

, 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 M. 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

Goldsmiths Visual Cultures Department

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