Visual Culture

by Richard Howells, Joaquim Negreiros

Overview

This is a book about how to read visual images: from fine art to photography, film, television and new media. It explores how meaning is communicated by the wide variety of texts that inhabit our increasingly visual world. But, rather than simply providing set meanings to individual images, Visual Culture teaches readers how to interpret visual texts with their own eyes.

While the first part of the book takes readers through differing theoretical approaches to visual analysis, the second part shifts to a medium-based analysis, connected by an underlying theme about the complex relationship between visual culture and reality. Howells and Negreiros draw together seemingly diverse methodologies, while ultimately arguing for a polysemic approach to visual analysis.

The third edition of this popular book contains over fifty illustrations, for the first time in colour. Included in the revised text is a new section on images of power, fear and seduction, a new segment on video games, as well as fresh material on taste and judgement. This timely edition also offers a glossary and suggestions for further reading.

Written in a clear, lively and engaging style, Visual Culture continues to be an ideal introduction for students taking courses in visual culture and communications in a range of disciplines, including media and cultural studies, sociology, and art and design.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781509518784
Publisher:	Polity Press
Publication date:	02/26/2019
Edition description:	3rd ed.
Pages:	360
Product dimensions:	6.70(w) x 9.50(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Richard Howells is Professor of Cultural Sociology at King’s College London.

Joaquim Negreiros is a former lecturer and post-doctoral researcher at ESCS, ISCTE and other Portuguese higher education institutions, and now teaches at CSM, Lisbon.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface to the Third Edition

Introduction

Part I: Theory

1 Iconology

2 Form

3 Art History

4 Ideology

5 Semiotics

6 Hermeneutics

Part II: Media

7 Fine Art

8 Photography

9 Film

10 Television

11 New Media

Conclusion

Glossary

Notes

Bibliography

Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"This second edition is a comprehensive, sophisticated, eminently readable analysis of what everyone sees but almost no one notices."
John Stilgoe, Harvard University

"Generous, wide-ranging, always helpful and clear, this second edition of Richard Howells' Visual Culture is a succinct and versatile guide to the different languages that images speak. For the literature student in particular, this is, I believe, the best general introduction available to the key ideas, the key questions and the key texts of visual culture."
John Harvey, University of Cambridge

"As a guide for the study of visual culture, this volume stands out for breadth, accessibility, and usefulness. The authors examine writers who have changed the way we think and see, the nature and experience of visual media, and leading conceptual tools on which the study of visual culture has relied. The result is a highly readable, deeply informed and richly illuminating book."
David Morgan, Duke University

"Visual Culture ranges across diverse disciplines and entertains multiple-sometimes opposing-perspectives on its subject. It provides a comprehensive introduction to media theory and a practical grounding in the analysis of multiple media, from fine arts to television, and from photography to new media."
Paul K Eiss, Director of the Center for the Arts in Society, Carnegie Mellon University

Editorial Reviews

‘Updated, authoritative, and ranging from traditional to the newest media, Visual Culture remains the premier, portal-opening text.’
John R. Stilgoe, Harvard University

‘Summoning Vasari, Arnold, Baxandall, Berger and a dozen other masters of visual culture, the authors equip the text with idioms, definitions and a code of manners with which to appraise, to judge, to put in order and to relish the vast range of what we all see.’
Fred Inglis, University of Warwick

From the Publisher