Introduction to Visual Culture

Nicholas Mirzoeff is Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University.

"Sensitive to current debates about the politics of articulation that ground our understanding of visual culture, visual activism, and visual relations, Mirzoeff’s third edition develops new frameworks for the analysis of image culture. Leveraging the book’s original concerns—the legacy of slavery, refugees and surveillance, global capital and colonial histories—Mirzoeff reinvigorates his arguments, drawing on contemporary events and social movements with insight and urgency. Provocative, relevant and iconoclastic, An Introduction to Visual Culture remains a critical text for students across the disciplines."Jennifer A. González, UC Santa Cruz, United States"The newly revised 3rd edition of Nicholas Mirzoeff’s anti-foundational classic issues the rallying call for refusing the resignations of merely describing visual culture as it is. Showing us how to activate and motivate the real and urgent question of what visual culture does and how to practice it, this primer is also the manifesto on method that takes us from the groundwork of acknowledgment through tactics for visual activism and ways of confronting catastrophe, while never losing sight of the power of the strike as lens and the ways we may yet forge relation in becoming visible to one another by consent. This new edition may be a renewed classic but not for the shelf. As open theory forged in practice, it calls to be used, to be put to the test of sharing out as widely as possible, seeing with and past it, activating the visible for ourselves and each other."Jill Casid, University of Wisconsin-Madison, United States"In his third edition of An Introduction to Visual Culture Nicholas Mirzoeff stages a balance of optimism and caution that ultimately insists on a need for action. Thinking through images as a site of agency, Mirzoeff centres his argument on the way they serve to reinforce or challenge hierarchies of power. Calling it a ‘visible relation,’ he identifies visual culture as a process, or better said, a bringing together of worlds (2). At best, that union is compassionate, respectful or even admiring. At worst, the relationship that an image mediates between two subjects weakens reciprocity and bolsters division… [Mirzoeff invites us] to take seriously our position as not just viewers but also as participants in the creation and deconstruction of equality through our act of looking."Sara Blaylock, Visual Studies

• Introduction Visualization 1: Perspective, Visuality and the Way of Seeing Part 1. Foundational 1.Acknowledgement and Groundwork 2. Indigenous Ways of Seeing 3. In Slavery’s Wake 4.Surveillance and Counter-Surveillance 5.Unfixing the Gaze Visualization 2: The Ambassadors by Hans Holbein Visualization 3: The Decisive Moment and The Limits of Looking Part 2. Tactics of Visual Activism 6. Removal 7.Restitution 8. Repair and Reparations Visualization 4: Power Figures: Minkisi Nkondi Part 3. Catastrophe 9. Nakba 10. The Climate {R}evolution 11. Plague and War Visualization 5: Taking a Knee