Reading the Visual

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...