Visual Culture

Outline

What is Visual Culture?

Visual culture is a philosophical and epistemological stance that acknowledges visuality as central to the constitution of the world.

The pervasiveness and power of the image in Western culture means that it is a central way to represent issues in society—to the extent that Western intellectual thought in the late-twentieth century experienced a “pictorial turn,” where the image assumed a privileged status in its ability to reflect and communicate the world.

Visual Culture as a cultural condition

Visual culture is thus defined as a shift in reality and a present-day condition where images play a central role in the creation of knowledge and the construction of identity.

However, two general themes seem to cut across most scholarly writing around the subject of inquiry and methodological process.

Contextualizing of Visuality in Everyday Life

The concept of everyday life is important because meanings and identities are created and contested through the seemingly endless array of visual images we encounter on a daily basis.

Other inquires in the field of visual culture revolve around the concept of vision as a totality, the ubiquity of vision in a particular era, or how images play a central role in representing certain parts of the world.

The Paradox of the Image in the Twenty-First Century

?Vision in the twenty-first century is often seen as a tyrannical phenomenology that forces itself on social relations, marginalizing the experience of other senses, such as touch or sound.

Conclusion

?Visual culture is also a way of referring to the images, objects, and instruments tangled up in the complex process of understanding what it means to see and be seen, and to picture something or someone—including ourselves

Visual Culture

Research on visual culture tends to revolve around at least three complex and wide-ranging concepts: representation, meaning, and culture. This complexity makes the as-yet-inchoate discipline diverse in its aims and eclectic in its methods, thus reflecting a radical interdisciplinary. Visual culture, as a term, refers to both the visual aspects of culture and to visual culture as a scholarly discipline. Visual culture offers profound implications for understanding consumer culture. Visual culture, as a discipline, highlights the fundamental importance of the image in cultural life (Mirzeoff, 1999).

Visual Culture as a Cultural Condition

The term visual culture can connote a shift or turn in society where the increase in production and consumption of imagery in concert with technological and economic developments has profoundly changed the world and the context in which awareness of that world and one's identity in it is rooted. Although one could argue that the “visual” has always mediated an understanding of identity, experience in much of the world today is deeply affected by an abundance of visual imagery in a variety of global contexts, in a different respect than the past. For example, images flow across borders to convey information, offer pleasure, and initiate and reinforce values and beliefs. These circulating signs affect the formation of individual identities and inter-individual power relations in ways unimaginable for many even a few decades ago. The relationship between humans and their experience in visual ...