An Introduction to Visual Culture

2nd Edition

By Nicholas Mirzoeff

  • Price: $39.95
  • Binding/Format: Paperback
  • ISBN: 978-0-415-32759-6
  • Publish Date: May 26th 2009
  • Imprint: Routledge
  • Pages: 330 pages

Description

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.

Contents

Preface Introduction 1. Sight Becomes Vision: From al-Haytham to Perspective 2. '1492': Expulsions, Expropriations, Encounters 3. Slavery, Modernity and Visual Culture 4. Panoptic Modernity 5. Imperial Transcultures: from Kongo to Congo 6. Sexuality Disrupts: Measuring the Silences 7. Inventing the West 8. Decolonizing Vision 9. Discrete States: Digital Worlds from the Difference Engine to Web 2.0 10. The Death of ‘The Death of Photography’ 11. Celebrity: from Imperial Monarchy to Reality TV 12. Watching War.

Author Bio

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).

 

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