Visual Culture: The Reader (Published in association with The Open University) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0761962484 ISBN 13: 9780761962489

Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd, 1999

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 unmade connections between art, film and photography history and theory, history, semiotics and communications, media studies, and cultural theory.

Visual Culture sets the agenda for the study of Visual Culture and will be essential reading for researchers and students alike.

About this title

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)

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 PhD 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.

Edition details

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0761962484
• ISBN 13: 9780761962489
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 496
• Editor: Evans Jessica, Hall Stuart