The Block Reader In Visual Culture

Brings together classic writings by leading cultural theorists which were first published in the journal and are now unavailable.

Drawing on interviews, responses to questionnaires, and oral histories by U.S.

The nineteenth century is central to contemporary discussions of visual culture. This reader brings together key writings on the period, exploring such topics as photographs, exhibitions and advertising.

"Anthology [of] key texts that document the history of art over the past one thousand years"--P. [4] of cover.

The diverse essays collected here constitute an exploration of the emerging interdisciplinary field of visual culture, and examine why modern and postmodern culture place such a premium on rendering experience in visual form.

These texts represent both the formation of visual culture, and the ways in which it has transformed, and continues to transform, our understanding and experience of the world as a visual domain.

A primary resource of key statements on photographic meaning, representation and visual culture. The editors combine classic and contemporary essays from a range of scholars including Barthes, Sontag, Baudrillard and Mulvey. The reader is divided into three parts, which present the culture of the image and the making of meaning; the history and theory of critical photography and the regulation of meaning; and the way in which differences of race, class, gender and sexuality are culturally constructed and represented. Black and white illustrations feature throughout.

What is cultural about vision--or visual about culture? In this ambitious book, Whitney Davis provides new answers to these difficult and important questions by presenting an original framework for understanding visual culture. Grounded in the theoretical traditions of art history, A General Theory of Visual Culture argues that, in a fully consolidated visual culture, artifacts and pictures have been made to be seen in a certain way; what Davis calls "visuality" is the visual perspective from which certain culturally constituted aspects of artifacts and pictures are visible to informed viewers. In this book, Davis provides a systematic analysis of visuality and describes how it comes into being as a historical form of vision. Expansive in scope, A General Theory of Visual Culture draws on art history, aesthetics, the psychology of perception, the philosophy of reference, and vision science, as well as visual-cultural studies in history, sociology, and anthropology. It provides penetrating new definitions of form, style, and iconography, and draws important and sometimes surprising conclusions (for example, that vision does not always attain to visual culture, and that visual culture is not always wholly visible). The book uses examples from a variety of cultural traditions, from prehistory to the twentieth century, to support a theory designed to apply to all human traditions of making artifacts and pictures--that is, to visual culture as a worldwide phenomenon.