TY  - BOOK
AU  - Mirzoeff,Nicholas
TI  - An introduction to visual culture
SN  - 0415158761 :
AV  - HM500 .M57 1999
PY  - 1999///
CY  - London, New York
PB  - Routledge
KW  - Visual sociology
KW  - Popular culture
KW  - Visual communication
KW  - Mass media
KW  - Art and society
KW  - Postmodernism
N1  - Includes bibliographic references and index; Introduction: What is visual culture? -- Visualizing -- Visual Power, Visual Pleasure -- Visuality -- Culture -- Everyday Life -- Visuality -- Picture definition: Line, color, vision -- Perspectives -- Discipline and Color -- Normalizing Color: Color Blindness -- Light Over Color -- White -- The age of photography (1839-1982) -- The Death of Painting -- The Birth of the Democratic Image -- Death and Photography -- From Photo Noir to Post-Photography -- The Death of Photography -- Virtuality: From virtual antiquity to the pixel zone -- Interfaces with Virtuality -- Virtuality Goes Global -- Telesublime -- Virtual Reality -- Virtual Reality and Everyday Life -- Virtual Identity -- Net Life -- More Pixels Anyone? -- Virtual Bodies -- Culture -- Transculture: From Kongo to the Congo -- Inventing the Heart of Darkness -- Resistance Through Ritual -- Cultural Memory -- New Visions from the Congo -- Seeing sex -- Fetishizing the Gaze -- From Inversion to Opposites and Ambiguity -- Seeing Female Sex -- Mixing: the Cultural Politics of Race and Reproduction -- Queering the Gaze: Roger Casement's Eyes -- First contact: From Independence Day to 1492 and Millennium -- Enter the Extraterrestials -- The Return of the Empire -- Aliens as Evil -- Trekking -- TV Past and Present -- Global/Local -- Diana's death: Gender, photography and the inauguration of global visual culture -- Popularity and Cultural Studies -- Photography and the Princess -- Pictures in India -- The Celebrity Punctum -- Flags and Protocol: the Devil in the Detail -- Death and the Maiden: the Sign of New Britain -- Pixel Planet -- Coda:Fire
N2  - The emerging field of visual culture poses rough terrain for beginners with its nuanced distinctions and for beginners with its nuanced distinctions and reliance on postmodern theory. Not until Introduction to Visual Culture has 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, and then demonstrates this through powerful examples, from Princess 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 reading images 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, Introduction to Visual Culture offers an accessible entry to this new way of understanding images
ER  -