Introduction to Visual Culture

Nicholas Mirzoeff is Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. He is author and editor of several books including Watching Babylon (1995) and The Visual Culture Reader, also now in its second edition (2002).

"Nicholas Mirzoeff’s new synthesis of visual culture study is a tour-de-force comparative reading that begins where most comprehensive books in the field leave off, with globalization. If, as Mirzoeff tells us in his scintillating style, visuality has alienated vision from its users, then this lively and impassioned account is certain to put readers right at the heart of the problem with a spectrum of examples through which to work it through." – Lisa Cartwright, Professor of Communication and Science Studies, University of California at San Diego, USA"In this updated and expanded second edition of his provocative An Introduction to Visual Culture, Nicholas Mirzoeff takes us on a momentous journey through visual culture to our own network society. As a careful historian and dextrous theorist, by interweaving modalities of visuality, the author tracks a path – sometimes utopian, more often dystopian – in search of a possibility just beyond our grasp: the dream of transculture as the sign of our democratic politics. For Mirzoeff, such a journey is only feasible by way of the interdisciplinary field of Visual Culture Studies where visual culture is understood as the study of ‘the place of visuality in the division of the sensible’. He is right." – Marquard Smith, Founder and Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Visual Culture, and Principal Lecturer in Visual Culture Studies, University of Westminster, London, UK

• Preface Introduction 1. Sight Becomes Vision: From al-Haytham to Perspective 2. '1492': Expulsions, Expropriations, Encounters 3. Slavery, Modernity and Visual Culture 4. Panoptic Modernity 5. Imperial Transcultures: From Kongo to Congo 6. Sexuality Disrupts: Measuring the Silences 7. Inventing the West 8. Decolonizing Vision 9. Discrete States: Digital Worlds From the Difference Engine to Web 2.0 10. The Death of ‘The Death of Photography’ 11. Celebrity: From Imperial Monarchy to Reality TV 12. Watching War.