Nicholas Mirzoeff: An Introduction to Visual Culture (1999)

“The emerging field of visual culture poses rough terrain for beginners with its nuanced distinctions and reliance on postmodern theory. Not untilAn Introduction to Visual Culturehas any book attempted to present a comprehensive and accessible approach to this exciting new subject. Nicholas Mirzoeff begins by defining what visual culture is, and explores how and why visual media–fine art, cinema, the Internet, advertising, performance, photography, television–have become so central to contemporary everyday life. He argues that the visual is replacing the linguistic as our primary means of communicating with each other and of understanding our postmodern world, demonstrating this through powerful examples, from Diana’s funeral to the Latina singer Selena, and from the X-Files to Independence Day. Mirzoeff then examines the importance of race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, and the body in visual culture. These various forms of social discourse provide essential tools for readingimages and thus define the study of visual culture as an inherently political project. Mirzoeff tackles the difficult subject of the gaze and the “other” and offers the reader a clear synthesis of these concepts. Lively and provocative,An Introduction to Visual Cultureoffers an accessible entry to this new way of understanding images.”

Keywords: Art and society, Visual communication, Visual perception, Mass media, Communication and culture, Postmodernism, Visual sociology, Popular culture, Media

Publisher Routledge, 1999
ISBN 0415158761, 9780415158763
274 pages

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Edward S. Herman, Noam Chomsky: Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988/2002)

In this pathbreaking work, now with a new introduction, Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky show that, contrary to the usual image of the news media as cantankerous, obstinate, and ubiquitous in their search for truth and defense of justice, in their actual practice they defend the economic, social, and political agendas of the privileged groups that dominate domestic society, the state, and the global order.

Based on a series of case studies—including the media’s dichotomous treatment of “worthy” versus “unworthy” victims, “legitimizing” and “meaningless” Third World elections, and devastating critiques of media coverage of the U.S. wars against Indochina—Herman and Chomsky draw on decades of criticism and research to propose a Propaganda Model to explain the media’s behavior and performance. Their new introduction updates the Propaganda Model and the earlier case studies, and it discusses several other applications. These include the manner in which the media covered the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement and subsequent Mexican financial meltdown of 1994-1995, the media’s handling of the protests against the World Trade Organization, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund in 1999 and 2000, and the media’s treatment of the chemical industry and its regulation. What emerges from this work is a powerful assessment of how propagandistic the U.S. mass media are, how they systematically fail to live up to their self-image as providers of the kind of information that people need to make sense of the world, and how we can understand their function in a radically new way.

Publisher Pantheon Books, 2002
ISBN 0375714499, 9780375714498
Length 412 pages

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Frances Guerin: A Culture of Light: Cinema and Technology in 1920s Germany (2005)

Cinema is a medium of light. And during Weimar Germany’s advance to technological modernity, light – particularly the representational possibilities of electrical light – became the link between the cinema screen and the rapid changes that were transforming German life.

In Frances Guerin’s compelling history of German silent cinema of the 1920s, the innovative use of light is the pivot around which a new conception of a national cinema, and a national culture emerges. Guerin depicts a nocturnal Germany suffused with light – electric billboards, storefronts, police searchlights – and shows how this element of the mise-en-scene came to reflect both the opportunities and the anxieties surrounding modernity and democracy. Guerin’s interpretations center on use of light in films such as Schatten (1923), Variete (1925), Metropolis (1926), and Der Golem (1920). In these films we see how light is the substance of image composition, the structuring device of the narrative, and the central thematic concern.

This history relieves German films of the responsibility to explain the political and ideological instability of the period, an instability said to be the uncertain foundation of Nazism. In unlocking this dubious link, A Culture of Light redefines the field of German film scholarship.

Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2005
ISBN 0816642869, 9780816642861
314 pages

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