An Introduction to Visual Culture / Edition 2

by Nicholas Mirzoeff

Overview

An Introduction to Visual Culture provides a wide-ranging introduction to the now established interdisciplinary field of visual culture.

Mapping a global history and theory of visual culture, An Introduction to Visual Culture asks how and why visual media have become so central to everyday life. This new, completely updated second edition has been adapted to match the challenges of interpreting globalization since the publication of the first edition a decade ago.

Improved text design and colour images throughout make it an even more valuable teaching tool. Brand new features in the second edition include Key Image studies from Holbein’s The Ambassadors, to Blade Runner and the Abu Ghraib atrocities; and a Key Words section in each chapter, discussing vital critical terms and the debates that surround them.

In this innovative, thoroughly revised and extended edition, Nicholas Mirzoeff explores:

• an extensive range of visual forms from painting, sculpture, and photography to television, cinema, and the Internet
• the centrality of ‘race’ and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, and the body in shaping visual culture
• the importance of images of natural disaster and conflict, such as Hurricane Katrina and the ongoing war in Iraq.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415327596
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	05/26/2009
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Nicholas Mirzoeff is Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. He is author and editor of several books including Watching Babylon (1995) and The Visual Culture Reader, also now in its second edition (2002).

Table of Contents

List of illustrations vii

Preface xiii

Illustration acknowledgments xvi

Introduction: Global Visual Cultures: Paradox and Comparison 1

Keyword The Division of the Sensible 17

Chapter 1 Sight becomes Vision: From al-Haytham to Perspective 21

Keyword Culture as Transculture 41

Chapter 2 "1492": Expulsions, Expropriations, Encounters 45

Breakout Image The Ambassadors: Slavery and the Gaze 63

Chapter 3 Slavery, Modernity and Visual Culture 68

Keyword Visuality 89

Chapter 4 Panoptic Modernity 94

Keyword Modernity 113

Breakout Image Photography and Death 119

Chapter 5 Imperial Transcultures: From Kongo to Congo 127

Keyword Race 147

Chapter 6 Sexuality Disrupts: Measuring the Silences 153

Keyword The Fetish and the Gaze 169

Chapter 7 Inventing the West 176

Keyword Empire and the State of Emergency 192

Chapter 8 Decolonizing Visions 197

Keyword Networks 218

Chapter 9 Discrete States: Digital Worlds from the Difference Engine to Web 2.0 224

Breakout Image Blade Runner 245

Chapter 10 The Death of the Death of Photography 250

Keyword Spectacle and Surveillance 264

Chapter 11 Celebrity: From Imperial Monarchy to Reality TV 271

Breakout Image The Abu Ghraib Photographs 287

Chapter 12 Watching War 292

Index 310

Editorial Reviews

"Sensitive to current debates about the politics of articulation that ground our understanding of visual culture, visual activism, and visual relations, Mirzoeff’s third edition develops new frameworks for the analysis of image culture. Leveraging the book’s original concerns—the legacy of slavery, refugees and surveillance, global capital and colonial histories—Mirzoeff reinvigorates his arguments, drawing on contemporary events and social movements with insight and urgency. Provocative, relevant and iconoclastic, An Introduction to Visual Culture remains a critical text for students across the disciplines."

Jennifer A. González, UC Santa Cruz, United States

"The newly revised 3rd edition of Nicholas Mirzoeff’s anti-foundational classic issues the rallying call for refusing the resignations of merely describing visual culture as it is. Showing us how to activate and motivate the real and urgent question of what visual culture does and how to practice it, this primer is also the manifesto on method that takes us from the groundwork of acknowledgment through tactics for visual activism and ways of confronting catastrophe, while never losing sight of the power of the strike as lens and the ways we may yet forge relation in becoming visible to one another by consent. This new edition may be a renewed classic but not for the shelf. As open theory forged in practice, it calls to be used, to be put to the test of sharing out as widely as possible, seeing with and past it, activating the visible for ourselves and each other."

 

Jill Casid, University of Wisconsin-Madison, United States

 

From the Publisher