Edited by Chris Jenks - carlosmoreno.info

VISUAL CULTURE
Visual Culture is a collection of original and critical essays addressing
‘vision’ as a social and cultural process. The book exposes the organised
but implicit structuring of a highly significant yet utterly routine dimension
of social relations, the ‘seen’. What we see, and the manner in which we
come to see it, is not simply part of a natural ability. It is rather intimately
linked with the ways that our society has, over time, arranged its forms of
knowledge, its strategies of power and its systems of desire. We can no
longer be assured that what we see is what we should believe in. There is
only a social not a formal relation between vision and truth.
The necessity, centrality and universality of vision has been a major
preoccupation of modernity; and the fracture and refraction of vision are
central to an understanding of the postmodern. Consequently, the role of
visual depiction, the practices of visual production and reproduction, and
the socialisation, history and conventions of visual perception are emergent
themes for sociology, cultural studies and critical theory in the visual arts.
The contributors all stem from these three traditions and all represent the
vanguard of new research in their areas. Though their perspectives vary,
they share a central problematic, the ‘visual’ character of contemporary
culture. Their approach is through a wide spectrum of representational
formations, ranging through advertising, film, painting and fine art,
journalism, photography, television and propaganda.
Contributors: Malcolm Barnard; Andrew Barry; Roy Boyne; James Donald;
Dick Hebdige; Ian Heywood; Chris Jenks; Justin Lorentzen; David Morley;
John O’Neill; Michael Phillipson; Don Slater; John Smith.
Chris Jenks is Head of the Department of Sociology at Goldsmiths’
College, University of London.