Visual culture studies recognizes that visual forms of media have become predominant in the postmodern world. It examines whether society has shifted more towards visuals and away from text in the last 50 years, accelerating in the last 10-20 years. The field merges the study of popular and high cultural forms, as visual content and codes now migrate across different media like print, television, film, the internet, and more. People learn the codes of different media and switch between them to navigate and make meaning from the visuals in everyday life.
3. Has there been a social and cultural shift
to the visual, over against the verbal and
textual, in the past 50 years, and has it
been accelerating in the past 10 or 20
years?
Or are our written, textual, and visual
systems continuing an ongoing
reconfiguration in a new (recognizable)
phase?
4. Study of visual culture merges
popular and "low" cultural forms,
media and communications, and
the study of "high" cultural forms or
fine art, design, and architecture.
5. The "visual culture" approach
acknowledges the reality of living in a
world of cross-mediation--our
experience of culturally meaningful
visual content appears in multiple
forms, and visual content and codes
migrate from one form to another:
6. print images and graphic design
TV and cable TV
film and video in all interfaces and playback/display
technologies
computer interfaces and software design
Internet/Web as a visual platform
digital multimedia
advertising in all media (a true cross-media institution)
fine art and photography
fashion
architecture, design, and urban design
7. We learn the codes for each form and code
switch among the media and the "high" and
"low" culture forms. The experience of
everyday life can be described as codeswitching or hacking the visual codes
around us to navigate and negotiate meaning
(see William Gibson, Pattern Recognition).
A woman relative cried...but neighborhood dead-end kids enjoyed the show when a small-time racketeer was shot and killed," wrote Weegee in the caption accompanying this startling photograph in his 1945 publication Naked City. On the facing page Weegee showed the bloody body lying in the street. Alternately laughing, staring in disbelief, or looking into the camera to grasp their own momentary chance to be recorded, the children who had witnessed this grisly scene form an unsettling amalgam of human emotion and self-absorption. Two women are among the group: one, whom Weegee mentioned above, stands at the center, her face contorted with anguished tears, her personal loss turned into public spectacle.