Visual Culture

As we look at paintings, movies, sculptures, television, photos, furniture, utensils, gardens, dance, buildings, artifacts and relics, landscape, toys, advertising such as billboards and TV. commercials, jewelry, clothes, light, maps, and websites, we receive more than just a memory of such visualizations, we learn more of our culture. Yes! Culture is strongly visible in the visual images that we see around us. Actually, these things that we perceive through our eyes are considered as evidences of our culture. Visual images are reflections of culture. Thus, Visual Culture was born.

As we study the meaning of Visual Culture, it would help us to get a better understanding of each word that comprises the term “Visual Culture”. Visual refers to everything that our eyes can see. Anything that is perceptible by the sense of sight. Culture, in the other hand, refers to the behaviors and beliefs characteristic of a particular social, ethnic, or age group.  So when you put them together, Visual Culture is mainly about studying culture through visual images. As most of us will perceive how a culture could have been recorded and could have been a part of history, we would think of the written records first. But, pictures and relics can be more valuable as evidences of existence and other traditions.

Therefore, according to Nicholas Mirzoeff, Visual Culture is considered a tactic for studying the past until the present functions of the world addressed through pictures, images, and other visualizations, rather than through written facts such as texts and words.

We can only study Visual Culture with regards to anything that requires seeing since it is focusing on aspects of culture that rely on visual images. This study often overlaps with film studies, psychoanalytic theory, gender studies, queer theory, and the study of television; it can also include video game studies, comics, traditional artistic media, advertising, the Internet, and any other medium that has a visual component. It can be associated with arts since it is also considered visual and can only be appreciated by seeing it. Visual Culture gives us a sense of fascination as we look at the beauty of life, and every other aspect that would also define ourselves and the culture that we’ve lived with.

Who started this study?

John Berger (Ways of Seeing, 1972) and Laura Mulvey (Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, 1975) made the early works regarding Visual Culture. Major work on Visual Culture has been done by W. J. T. Mitchell, particularly in his books Iconology and Picture Theory and by Griselda Polloc, an art historian and cultural theorist. Other writers include Stuart Hall, Jean-François Lyotard, Rosalind Krauss and Slavoj Zizek. Visual Culture studies have been increasingly important in religious studies through the work of David Morgan, Sally Promey, Jeffrey F. Hamburger, and S. Brent Plate.

Why Study Visual Culture?

Visual Culture gives us a better understanding about our culture and probably, our history. A wider scope of realizations since the medium used to study culture can be seen by our own eyes. It is even more realistic than any other recorded facts which are written down.