Visual Culture Theory

Catalog description

Visual Culture studies recognize the predominance of visual forms of media, communication, and information in the contemporary world, investigating both “high" cultural forms such as fine art, design, and architecture and popular cultural forms associated with mass media and communications. Visual Culture studies represents a turn in the discourse of the visual, which had focused on content-based, critical readings of images, and has since broadened its approach to additionally question the ways in which our consumption and production of images and image- based technologies are structured. Analyzing images from a social-historical and cultural perspective, visual culture asks: what are the effects of images? Can the visual be properly investigated with traditional methodologies, which have been based on language, not imagery? How do images visualize social difference? How are images viewed by varied audiences? How are images created in a culture and how do they circulate?