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This document provides an introduction to the concept of visual culture. It discusses how visual themes have become central to cultural and media studies but argues that visual culture itself has been somewhat overlooked. While seminal works like those of Barthes, Benjamin, Lacan and Foucault inform cultural studies, the document claims the specific rhetoric, genres, contexts and uses of visual imagery can become lost. It examines why visual culture has been neglected and outlines three parts that will consider the semiotics of images, how meanings of photography are regulated, and the relationship between images and subjectivity.
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0% found this document useful (0 votes)
371 views8 pagesEvansHall whatisVC
This document provides an introduction to the concept of visual culture. It discusses how visual themes have become central to cultural and media studies but argues that visual culture itself has been somewhat overlooked. While seminal works like those of Barthes, Benjamin, Lacan and Foucault inform cultural studies, the document claims the specific rhetoric, genres, contexts and uses of visual imagery can become lost. It examines why visual culture has been neglected and outlines three parts that will consider the semiotics of images, how meanings of photography are regulated, and the relationship between images and subjectivity.
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Şule Topçuoğlu GülerCopyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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/ 8
Visual culture: the reader
edited by
Jessica Evans
and Stuart Hall
SAGE Publications
London * Thousand Oaks + New Delhi
in association with UeReRiy What is visual culture?
Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall
Certain themes imbued with visual metaphors
and terminologies of looking and seeing have
become the staple diet of cultural and media
studies: the society of the spectacle and the
simulacrum; the politics of representation;
the male gaze and the possibility of a female
gaze; the ‘mirror stage’; fetishism and
voyeurism; the reproduction of the image; the
‘other’ as the projection of racialized discourse.
it may thus appear contentious to claim, as we
do, that ‘visual culture’ has been somewhat
overlooked in the rapid expansion of cultural
and media studies throughout the past decade
and a half. Contentious because, after all, the
work of Barthes, Benjamin, Lacan and Foucault,
with their clearly visual concerns - not to
mention a host of others - forms the canonical
foundations upon which much cultural and
media studies rest. Moreover, the mechanically or electronically reproduced image is the semantic and
technical unit of the modern mass media and at the heart of post-war popular
culture. However, while this is acknowledged widely within the discipline of
media and cultural studies, normally via ritual reference to the seminal work of
Walter Benjamin, the visual image or photograph seems only of interest as
the origin, as the technological dawn, of a great process of development in which, in
fan era of mass communication and the commodification of information,
messages can be transmitted in principle to a plurality of recipients and audiences
In fact, the neglect of specifically visual culture is understandable, logical even, and
for a number of reasons. Firs, we can consider matters of epistemology. The
revolution across much of the social and human sciences, characterized by what is
variously termed the ‘linguistic turn’ or, wee would prefer, more broadly, the ‘cultural
turn’, has led to an emphasis upon social practices and relations as signifying
practices ~ practices which organize and constitute social ations and involve/assume
interpretative, meaning-making persons. In the field of image studies, then, we
‘cannot turn back to the pre-semiatic assumptions of reflectionism; we cannot
‘any longer think of social experience as existing in 2 prectinguistc realm, abstracted
rom the signifying systems which in fact steucture it, Furthermore, ais well known in
terms of the raison o’étre of cultural studies as a cisciplie in its own right,
this approach has permitted a reach into the cultural practices ofthe everyday ~ such
1a the popular practices of photography, hitherto dismissed for their trite and
highly restricted iconography. None the les, there isa sense that the privileging of the
linguistic madel in the study of representation has led to the assumption that
visual artefacts are fundamentally the same, and function in just the same way, 35
any other cultural text. Accordingly, the specific rhetoric, genres, institutional
contexts and uses of visual imagery can become lost in the more global identification
Of cultural tends and their epic narratives of transformations of consciousness in
the rubric of ‘postmodern culture’. As the art historian Carol Armstrong has
put it, ‘Within this model paintings and such are to be viewed not a5 particularized
things made for particular historical uses, but as exchanges circulating in some
great, boundless, and often curiously ahistorical economy of images, subjects, and
lother representations. That within the increasingly cyberspace model of visual studies,
“text” is the mother-model for utterances, performances, fashionings, and sign
collections of all kinds is not unrelated to this disembodiment of the cultural object”
(Armstrong in “Visual Culture Questionnaire’, 1996; 27)
Secondly, there are matters of a substantive kind here, connected with the nature of
the objects one studies, Iti quite clear, for example, that ‘photography’ fs not
4 unified practice, but a medium utterly diverse in its functions, a medium ‘whose
Status as 3 technology varies with the power celations which invest it (Tagg,
this volume, p. 246). itis hard to think of one institution in society that does not
Use reproduced images. Market research surveys suggest that just under three:
{quarters of the adult population own a camera. ‘Family’ occasions are frequently cited
‘as one of the principle reasons for camera ownership (see the discussion in
Cultural Trends, 1990: 43-45). t therefore makes no sense to consider the ‘meaning
of photography’ without considering the ways in which the meanings and uses
lof photography are regulated by the formats and institutions of production,
WHAT IS VISUAL CULTURE? distribution and consumption (be they magazines or newspapers, the advertising and
publicity industries, camera manufacturers — or other socially organized relations
such as the family). However, under the alibi of ‘visual culture’ one can easily
‘Jip into an analysis ofthese contexts alone. Its here that the notion of discourse is
entra. In its emphasis upon the integral relations of meaning and use, it rescues
Us from the solely textual concems of a semiotic analysis, but aso allows us
to check the side into older ‘productionst’ models which provide a limiting view of
practices of meaning and cultural construction, seeing them only as
manifestations of determining and logically prior events at the level of the economic
(see Watney, Chapter 10), One cannot understand, for example, the practices
Of the amateur snapshot photographer, nor account for the severely restricted
‘style’ of the images he or she typically produces, without also considering how this
practice intersects with the camera and film manufacturing industry, with the
developing and processing companies, with the relationships in modern societies
between work and leisure, with definitions, idealizations and activities of family
life, and, not least, with localized and historically specific gendered conceptions of
the identity, beliefs and skills of the photographer (see Porter, 1989/90; Holland
‘and Spence, 1991; Watney and Slater, Chapters 10 and 18 in this volume).
|As we have indicated, cultural studies rests on the achievements of semiotics as 2
‘whole and stakes its distinctiveness upon the analysis of the symbolic, classificatory
and, in short, meaning-making practices that are at the heart ofall cultural
production and consumption. Any study of the image conducted under the impact
Of cultural studies is indebted to semiotics. Part |, ‘Cultures of the Visual’, then,
begins with some classic statements of the semiotic position, the readings dealing
in particular with the stil perplexing issue of the sameness and difference of
‘written and verbal language to the visual image. Their underlying preoccupation is
with the extent to which we can conceive of images a5 a ‘language’
However, the scrupulously pure project of the structuralist moment of semiotics,
which conceives of language as a system of signs immanent to a single or bounded
‘roup of texts and studied independently of history or the particular utterances of
human subjects, needs to be both augmented and qualified. Accordingly, our
ensuing selection of readings, though rooted in the basic assumptions of classical
semiotics, seeks in various ways to develop and complicate its insights and
conclusions. The selections in Section 8 of Part | depart from the model established by
semiotics; thus, they are not concerned with the ‘meaning’ of any image or
corpus of images but with a culture in which reproducibility provides the conditions
of existence of any particular meaning. Other readings in this section are
Underwritten by the assumption that the sensibilities of modern societies are shaped
through cultural technologies ~ such as modern penal architecture and the
camera ~ which reinvent the relations between seeing and knowing as mutually
constitutive.
Parti, Regulating Photographic Meanings’, goes on to consider the particular
historical, institutional and archival conditions which both enable and contrain and, in
short, regulate photographic meaning. The readings in Section C represent
some key statements of the methodolagical approaches to the study of photography,
JESSICA EVANS AND STUART HALL constituted bythe problem of how to account fr photographie ‘style’, and how best