Visual Culture: The Reader / Edition 1

by Jessica Evans, Stuart Hall

Overview

Visual Culture provides an invaluable resource of over 30 key statements from a wide range of disciplines, including four editorial essays which place the readings in their historical and theoretical context. Although underpinned by a focus on contemporary cultural theory, this reader puts issues of visual culture and the rhetoric of the image at center stage.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780761962489
Publisher:	SAGE Publications
Publication date:	07/06/1999
Series:	Published in association with The Open University
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	512
Product dimensions:	6.69(w) x 9.53(h) x (d)

About the Author

Jessica Evans is Senior Lecturer in Cultural & Media Studies at the Open University.

Stuart Hall was born and raised in Jamaica and arrived in Britain on a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford in 1950. In 1958, he left his Ph D on Henry James to found the New Left Review, which did much to open a debate about immigration and the politics of identity. Along with Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart he established the first Cultural Studies programme at a British university in Birmingham in 1964, bringing the study of popular culture into the understanding of political and social change.

After spending more than four decades as one of the UK’s leading public intellectuals, Hall retired from formal academic life in 1997 and since then has continued to devote himself to questions of representation, creativity and difference. He became the chair of two foundations, Iniva, the Institute of International Visual Arts, and Autograph ABP, which seeks to promote photographers from culturally diverse backgrounds, and championed the opening of Iniva’s new Rivington Place arts complex in east London in 2007.

Table of Contents

What is Visual Culture? - Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall
PART ONE: CULTURES OF THE VISUAL
Introduction - Jessica Evans
A: Rhetorics of the Image
The Natural Attitude - Norman Bryson
Rhetoric of the Image - Roland Barthes
Art, Common Sense and Photography - Victor Burgin
Myth Today - Roland Barthes
B: Techniques of the Visible
Panopticism - Michel Foucault
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction - Walter Benjamin
The Image-World - Susan Sontag
Separation Perfected - Guy Debord
The Bottom Line on Planet One - Dick Hebdige
Squaring up to The Face
PART TWO: REGULATING PHOTOGRAPHIC MEANINGS
Introduction - Jessica Evans
C: Theorizing Photography
On the Institutions of Photography - Simon Watney
The Social Definition of Photography - Pierre Bourdieu
Reading an Archive - Allan Sekula
Photography between Labour and Capital
Photography's Discursive Spaces - Rosalind Krauss
D: Institutions and Practices in Photography
The Museum's Old, the Library's New Subject - Douglas Crimp
Living with Contradictions - Abigail Solomon-Godeau
Critical Practices in the Age of Supply-Side Aesthetics
Evidence, Truth and Order and A Means of Surveillance - John Tagg
Feeble Monsters - Jessica Evans
Making Up Disabled People
Marketing Mass Photography - Don Slater
PART THREE: LOOKING AND SUBJECTIVITY
Introduction - Stuart Hall
E: Theoretical Perspectives
Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses - Louis Althusser
Fetishism - Sigmund Freud
The Scoptophilic Instinct and Identification - Otto Fenichel
The Subject - Kaja Silverman
Fantasia - Elizabeth Cowie
The Other Question - Homi K Bhabha
The Stereotype and Colonial Discourse
F: Gendering the Gaze
Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema - Laura Mulvey
Desperately Seeking Difference - Jackie Stacey
White Privilege and Looking Relations - Jane Gaines
Race and Gender in Feminist Film Theory
Sexuality in the Field of Vision - Jacqueline Rose
G: ‘Seeing' Racial Difference
The Fact of Blackness - Frantz Fanon
Alexander von Humboldt and the Reinvention of America - Mary Louise Pratt
Reading Racial Fetishism - Kobena Mercer
The Photographs of Robbert Mapplethorpe
Dark Continents - Mary Ann Doane
Epistemologies of Racial and Sexual Difference in Psycholanalysis and the Cinema
White - Richard Dyer

Editorial Reviews

‘Visual Culture offers readers incredible riches. It contains a number of important articles on theoretical matters involving the analysis and interpretation of images and their culture, social and political dimensions. As such, it is a major contribution to our understanding of visual culture' - Journal of Communication

From the Publisher

"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 essential text in visual and cultural studies."

Janet Wolff