The Visual Culture Reader - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0415141346 ISBN 13: 9780415141345

Publisher: Routledge, 1998

Synopsis

Visual culture is concerned with visual events in which information, meaning or pleasure is sought by the consumer in the encounter with visual artefacts, from oil paintings to the internet. The diverse essays collected here constitute a comprehensive exploration of the emerging interdisciplinary field of visual culture, and examine why modern and postmodern culture place such a premium on rendering experience in visual form.

About this title

Review

'This volume is required reading for anyone interested in media studies or visual culture. It brings critical visuality studies up to the moment and introduces new directions for future work. Summing Up: Essential. Graduate students, researchers, faculty.' - A. M. Laflen, Marist College in CHOICE

'This is a first rate collection covering the range and the depth of critical visual studies today. An essential guide for anyone concerned with the power of the image and the image of power.' - McKenzie Wark, Eugene Lang College, USA

'This 3rd edition of Nicholas Mirzoeff’s The Visual Culture Reader is unrecognizable from the collection’s first edition published way back in the last millennium. Its content, character, and urgency are invigorating and galvanizing. If the Reader’s first edition gave shape to Visual Culture Studies as an interdisciplinary field of inquiry, this 3rd edition will, I believe, mould visual culture itself.' - Marquard Smith, Founder and Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Visual Culture & Director of Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture, University of Westminster, UK

'With this volume, Mirzoeff has assembled an invaluable resource for scholars and practitioners of visual culture across disciplinary and geographic boundaries. Combining foundational texts and cutting-edge contemporary scholarship, the Third Edition of the VCR charts the emergence of critical visuality studies and brings the field into the twenty-first century.' - A. Joan Saab, University of Rochester, USA

Synopsis

The Visual Cultural Reader has arisen out of the recognition of the wealth of visual experience in contemporary culture and the need to analyse these experiences. The diverse essays collected here constitute a comprehensive exploration of the emerging interdisciplinary field of visual culture, and examine why modern and postmodern culture place such a premium on rendering experience in visual form. Covering a wealth of different visual forms including photography, painting, sculpture, advertising, virtual reality and other electronic imaging systems, the contributors here are grouped into sections addressing specific themes, each with an introduction by the editor. The opening section traces the pioneering work in visual culture of the last 15 years. Other sections deal with visual culture in relation to everyday life -its intersection with commerce, law, education, technology and war in shaping our uneasy sense of a rapidly-changing culture -the development of virtual reality and its effect on the relationship between the human body and space -the representation of race in the postcolonial age -and the recent re-evaluation of the gaze in relation to gender and sexuality.

Contributors: Malek Alloula, Oriana Baddeley, Ann Balsamo, Roland Barthes, Geoffrey Batchen, Suzanne Preston Blier, Susan Bordo, Sandra Buckley, Judith Butler, Anthea Callen, Nestor Garcia Canclin

Edition details

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0415141346
• ISBN 13: 9780415141345
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 560
• Editor: Mirzoeff Nicholas