1. Introduction to Visual Culture
FYS: Week 2
Deborah Jackson

2. Visual Culture seminar tutors and contacts:
Deborah Jackson
FYS co-ordinator
deborah.jackson@ed.ac.uk
Ruth Pelzer
Tutor
r.pelzer@ed.ac.uk

3. Assessment: Semester 1
For this part of the course,
you will need to write an
essay of 1,500, answering
one of a choice of questions
based around lectures you
will have attended.
Full details of the
assessment are on the e-
portal.
Assessment hand-in Sean Landers
date: Monday 26th Soft Wood (2006)
November

4. What is Visual Culture?
Very broadly, Visual Culture is everything that is seen,
that is produced to be seen, and the way in which it is
seen and understood. It is that part of culture that
communicates through visual means.
Alex Frost
Format wars (HD DVD), 2007

5. What is Visual Culture?
Visual culture, to borrow
Nicholas Mirzoeff's
definition, is perhaps best
understood as a tactic for
studying the functions of a
world addressed through
pictures, images, and
visualizations, rather than
through texts and words.

6. We are all participants in Visual Culture
“This is Visual Culture. It is not just a part of
your everyday life, it is your everyday life.”
Nicholas Mirzoeff
Kevin Harman
Hotel Room (2010)

7. Visual Culture Studies
Visual Culture is a growing interdisciplinary field of
study, which emerged out of the interaction of
anthropology, art history, media studies and many
other disciplines that focus on visual objects or the
way pictures and images are created and used within
society.
Bob and Roberta Smith
Hijack Reality (2008)

8. Visual Culture is
concerned with the
production, circulation,
and consumption of
images and the
changing nature of
subjectivity.
Keith Farquhar
Boy (2012)

9. Visual Culture involves exploring, analyzing, and
critiquing the relationship between culture and visuality,
from a range of diverse theoretical perspectives,
including:
Art history Postmodernism
Gender studies Marxism
Feminism Sociology Globalisation
Poststructuralism Literary theory
Philosophy Cultural anthropology
Postcolonialism Capitalism
Queer Theory Film/TV

10. Why study Visual
Culture?
Our experiences are
now more visual and
visualized than ever
before. In the era of
the visual
screen, your
viewpoint is crucial.
For most people, life
is mediated through
television, film, and
the Internet.

11. Why study Visual Culture?
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.
d Roberta Smith Make your own damn art... (1999)

12. Images often move across social arenas from documentary
images to advertisement to amateur video to news images to
artworks.
Each change in context produces a change in meaning.
Mark Wallinger
State Britain
(2007)
A recreation of
Brian Haw's
anti-war protest
in Parliament
Square.

13. New Ways of Seeing
Visual Culture studies recognises that the visual
image is not stable but changes its relationship to
exterior reality at particular moments.
A single image can serve a multitude of purposes,
appear in a range of settings, and mean different
things to different people.
Representation and spectatorship involves
relationships of power.

14. Decoding images
We decode, or read, complex images almost instantly, giving little
thought to our process of decoding.
We decode images by interpreting clues to intended, unintended,
and even suggested meanings.
These clues may be formal elements of the image, such as colour,
shade, and contrast, or the socio-historical context in which it is
presented.
Banner held up by Celtic
football fans, deriding their
rivals Glasgow Rangers

15. Visual Cultural Perspectives
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.
Big Fat Gypsy Weddings
Channel 4
(2010-)

16. Visual Cultural Perspectives
Visual culture analyses
the relevance of
classed, gendered,
sexual and raced
social identities.

17. The study of Visual Culture can include anything from:
• Painting
• Sculpture
• Installation
• Video art
• Digital art
• Photography
• Film
• Television
• The Internet
• Mobile screenic devices
• Fashion
• Medical & scientific imaging
• Architecture & Urban design
• Social spaces of museums, galleries, exhibitions, and other
private and public environments of the everyday

18. High and Low Culture
Avant-Garde and Kitsch (1939)
• Art of the masses, or kitsch, is uncultured.
Kitsch is tied to mass production, and is
not genuine culture
Many of Greenberg’s ideas have
been abandoned in contemporary
criticism, no longer does art criticism
Clement Greenberg
(1909 – 1994) make such a harsh distinctions
between high art and low art.

19. What is natural and what is acquired in our
visual experiences?
Artifacts and pictures have been made to be seen in
a certain way, that is to say, they are social and
cultural, not natural.
Visual Culture focuses on the visual as a place where
meanings are created and contested.
Jeremy Deller Sacrilege (2012)

20. Visual Culture Studies involves an analysis of
contemporary culture, media and society
It important to understand how societies construct
their visual perspectives through knowledge, beliefs,
art, morals, laws, and customs, amongst other things.
Cathy Wilkes
I Give You All My Money
(2012)

21. Images and Power
All images are produced
within dynamics of social
power and ideology.
Ideology is the shared set of
values and belief which
individuals live out their
complex relations to a range
of social structures.
Ideologies often appear to be
natural or given aspects of
everyday life.
Stuart Murray
Wohoahh… (2012)

22. Images and Ideology
Ideologies are produced and affirmed through the social
institutions in a given society, such as the family, education,
medicine, law, the government, and the entertainment industry,
among others.
Joanne Tatham &
Tom O’Sullivan
The Story… (2012)

23. Picture Theory
The emergence of Visual Culture
develops what W.J.T. Mitchell has
called Picture Theory.
Spectatorship (the look, the gaze,
the glance, the practices of
observation, surveillance, and
visual pleasure) involves many of
the same strategies as reading in
order to analyse an image
(decipherment, decoding,
interpretation, etc).
Barbara Kruger. Your gaze hits
the side of my face (1981)

24. Representation
Representation refers to the
use of images (and language)
to create meaning about the
world around us.
These systems have rules
and conventions about how to
express and interpret
meaning.
We learn the rules and
conventions of the systems of Alasdair Grey
representation within a given Faust in his study
culture. (1958)

25. Image and Meaning
All images have two levels of meaning:
The denotative meaning of the image refers to its literal
descriptive meaning.
The connotative meanings rely on cultural and historic context
of the image and its viewers.
Jeff Koons

26. The Myth of the Image
Roland Barthes uses the
term myth to refer to the
cultural values and beliefs
that are expressed through
connotations parading as
denotations.
Myth is the hidden set of
rules and conventions
through which meanings,
which are specific to a
certain group, are made to
seen universal. Scott Myles
Thank You (2012)

27. Visual Literacy
Visual literacy has no limits. It is not just the
understanding of canonical fine art, or the business of
advertising, but also the entire visual world.
Visual Culture studies provide you with the ability to
analyse the visual world.
Nam June Paik
Highway
(1995)