Description
Book Synopsis`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 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 the study of visual culture and the rhetoric of the image at centre stage.
Divided into three parts: Cultures of the Visual; Regulating Photographic Meaning; and Looking and Subjectivity, the Reader enables students to make hitherto
Trade Review
`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
"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
Table of ContentsWhat 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
