Visual Culture: Introduction
- 2. "Visual Culture" studies recognizes the predominance of visual forms of media, communication, and information in the postmodern world.
- 3. Has there been a social and cultural shift to the visual, over against the verbal and textual, in the past 50 years, and has it been accelerating in the past 10 or 20 years? Or are our written, textual, and visual systems continuing an ongoing reconfiguration in a new (recognizable) phase?
- 4. Study of visual culture merges popular and "low" cultural forms, media and communications, and the study of "high" cultural forms or fine art, design, and architecture.
- 5. The "visual culture" approach acknowledges the reality of living in a world of cross-mediation--our experience of culturally meaningful visual content appears in multiple forms, and visual content and codes migrate from one form to another:
- 6. print images and graphic design TV and cable TV film and video in all interfaces and playback/display technologies computer interfaces and software design Internet/Web as a visual platform digital multimedia advertising in all media (a true cross-media institution) fine art and photography fashion architecture, design, and urban design
- 7. We learn the codes for each form and code switch among the media and the "high" and "low" culture forms. The experience of everyday life can be described as codeswitching or hacking the visual codes around us to navigate and negotiate meaning (see William Gibson, Pattern Recognition).
- 8. WEEGEE (ARTHUR FELLIG), THEIR FIRST MURDER, I1941
- 9. PIETER CLAESZ, STILL LIFE WITH STONEWARE JUG, WINE GLASS, HERRING, AND BREAD, 1642
- 10. RENÉ MAGRITTE, TREACHERY OF IMAGES, 1928-29
- 11. RENÉ MAGRITTE, THE HUMAN CONDITION, 1933
Editor's Notes
- #9: A woman relative cried...but neighborhood dead-end kids enjoyed the show when a small-time racketeer was shot and killed," wrote Weegee in the caption accompanying this startling photograph in his 1945 publication Naked City. On the facing page Weegee showed the bloody body lying in the street. Alternately laughing, staring in disbelief, or looking into the camera to grasp their own momentary chance to be recorded, the children who had witnessed this grisly scene form an unsettling amalgam of human emotion and self-absorption. Two women are among the group: one, whom Weegee mentioned above, stands at the center, her face contorted with anguished tears, her personal loss turned into public spectacle.