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,

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, Deaf Studies, 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, László Moholy-Nagy, Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin.

Overview

Among theorists working within contemporary culture, this field of study often overlaps with film studies,

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,

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 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'', 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, 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, 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 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 () 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 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 t ...

('' Ways of Seeing'', 1972) and Laura Mulvey ('' 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 and William Ivins Jr. as well as iconic phenomenologists like Maurice Merleau-Ponty also played important roles in creating a foundation for the discipline. For the history of art, Svetlana Alpers 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
Giuliana Bruno
Stuart Hall, Roland Barthes, Jean-François Lyotard, Rosalind Krauss, Paul Crowther and Slavoj Žižek. Continuing work has been done by Lisa Cartwright, Marita Sturken, Margaret Dikovitskaya, Nicholas Mirzoeff, 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 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 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