Graham MacPhee: The Architecture of the Visible: Technology and Urban Visual Culture (2002)

Visual technology saturates everyday life. Theories of the visual–now key to debates across cultural studies, social theory, art history, literary studies and philosophy–have interpreted this new condition as the beginning of a dystopian future, of cultural decline, social disempowerment and political passivity. Intellectuals–from Baudelaire to Debord, Benjamin, Virilio, Jameson, Baudrillard and Derrida–have explored how technology not only reinvents the visual, but also changes the nature of culture itself. The heartland of all such cultural analysis has been the city, from Baudelaire’s flaneur to Benjamin’s arcades.The Architecture of the Visible presents a wide-ranging critical reassessment of contemporary approaches to visual culture through an analysis of pivotal technological innovation from the telescope, through photography to film. Drawing on the examples of Paris and New York–two key world cities for over two centuries–Graham MacPhee analyzes how visual technology is revolutionizing the landscape of modern thought, politics and culture.

Publisher Continuum International Publishing Group, 2002
Volume 3 of Technologies series
ISBN 0826459269, 9780826459268
234 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-12-20)

W. J. Thomas Mitchell: Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (1986)

“Mitchell undertakes to explore the nature of images by comparing them with words, or, more precisely, by looking at them from the viewpoint of verbal language.”

Publisher University of Chicago Press, 1986
ISBN 0226532291, 9780226532295
x+226 pages

Publisher

Reviews: Lee B. Brown (The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 1986), Roger Seamon (Canadian Philosophical Reviews, 1986), Patrick Maynard (London Review of Books, 1988), Anna J. Smith (Philosophy and Literature, 1988), Stefan Beyst (2010).

PDF (updated on 2012-7-18)

Tony Schirato, Jen Webb: Reading the Visual (2004)

An engaging guide to the skills needed to analyse images of all kinds, and a lucid introduction to the emerging field of visual culture.

From the body to the ever-present lens, the world is increasingly preoccupied with the visual. What exactly is the visual’ and how can we interpret the multitude of images that bombard us every day?

Reading the Visual takes as its starting point a tacit familiarity with the visual, and shows how we see even ordinary objects through the frameworks and filters of culture and personal experience. It explains how to analyse the mechanisms, conventions, contexts and uses of the visual in western cultures to make sense of visual objects of all kinds.

Drawing on a range of theorists including John Berger, Foucault, Bourdieu and Crary, the authors outline our relationship to the visual, tracing changes to literacies, genres and pleasures affecting ways of seeing from the Enlightenment to the advent of virtual technology.

Reading the Visual is an introduction to visual culture for readers across the humanities and social sciences.

Publisher Allen & Unwin, 2004
ISBN 1865087300, 9781865087306
224 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2013-12-9)