`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.
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
