Visual Culture

Jessica Evans is Senior Lecturer in Cultural & Media Studies at the Open University.  Stuart Hall was born and raised in Jamaica and arrived in Britain on a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford in 1950. In 1958, he left his PhD on Henry James to found the New Left Review, which did much to open a debate about immigration and the politics of identity. Along with Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart he established the first Cultural Studies programme at a British university in Birmingham in 1964, bringing the study of popular culture into the understanding of political and social change.After spending more than four decades as one of the UK’s leading public intellectuals, Hall retired from formal academic life in 1997 and since then has continued to devote himself to questions of representation, creativity and difference. He became the chair of two foundations, Iniva, the Institute of International Visual Arts, and Autograph ABP, which seeks to promote photographers from culturally diverse backgrounds, and championed the opening of Iniva’s new Rivington Place arts complex in east London in 2007.

• What is Visual Culture? - Jessica Evans and Stuart HallPART ONE: CULTURES OF THE VISUALIntroduction - Jessica EvansA: Rhetorics of the ImageThe Natural Attitude - Norman BrysonRhetoric of the Image - Roland BarthesArt, Common Sense and Photography - Victor BurginMyth Today - Roland BarthesB: Techniques of the VisiblePanopticism - Michel FoucaultThe Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction - Walter BenjaminThe Image-World - Susan SontagSeparation Perfected - Guy DebordThe Bottom Line on Planet One - Dick HebdigeSquaring up to The FacePART TWO: REGULATING PHOTOGRAPHIC MEANINGSIntroduction - Jessica EvansC: Theorizing PhotographyOn the Institutions of Photography - Simon WatneyThe Social Definition of Photography - Pierre BourdieuReading an Archive - Allan SekulaPhotography between Labour and CapitalPhotography′s Discursive Spaces - Rosalind KraussD: Institutions and Practices in PhotographyThe Museum′s Old, the Library′s New Subject - Douglas CrimpLiving with Contradictions - Abigail Solomon-GodeauCritical Practices in the Age of Supply-Side AestheticsEvidence, Truth and Order and A Means of Surveillance - John TaggFeeble Monsters - Jessica EvansMaking Up Disabled PeopleMarketing Mass Photography - Don SlaterPART THREE: LOOKING AND SUBJECTIVITYIntroduction - Stuart HallE: Theoretical PerspectivesIdeology and Ideological State Apparatuses - Louis AlthusserFetishism - Sigmund FreudThe Scoptophilic Instinct and Identification - Otto FenichelThe Subject - Kaja SilvermanFantasia - Elizabeth CowieThe Other Question - Homi K BhabhaThe Stereotype and Colonial DiscourseF: Gendering the GazeVisual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema - Laura MulveyDesperately Seeking Difference - Jackie StaceyWhite Privilege and Looking Relations - Jane GainesRace and Gender in Feminist Film TheorySexuality in the Field of Vision - Jacqueline RoseG: `Seeing′ Racial DifferenceThe Fact of Blackness - Frantz FanonAlexander von Humboldt and the Reinvention of America - Mary Louise PrattReading Racial Fetishism - Kobena MercerThe Photographs of Robbert MapplethorpeDark Continents - Mary Ann DoaneEpistemologies of Racial and Sexual Difference in Psycholanalysis and the CinemaWhite - Richard Dyer

`Visual Culture offers readers incredible riches. It contains a number of important articles on theoretical matters involving the analysis and interpretation of images and their culture, social and political dimensions. As such, it is a major contribution to our understanding of visual culture′ - Journal of Communication