Social Science Research Council

2007 DPDF Research Field:
Visual Culture

Since antiquity, vision has been both celebrated and distrusted as a source of knowledge. Vision is at once the oldest and newest means of communication and, arguably, one of the most crucial for twenty-first century research and scholarship. The global circulation of images and the impact of new technologies have posed crucial new questions for researchers who are investigating the historical, cultural, and social power of both vision and images.

“Visual Culture” can be defined by its objects of study which are considered modes of image-making defining visual experiences in specific historical contexts. Visual culture has a particular investment in vision as an historically and culturally specific experience, mediated by new technologies and the individual and social formations that they enable. Putting visual objects, image-production and reception at the center of inquiry has allowed scholars to re-organize historical periodization, broaden the disciplinary frameworks of interpretation beyond the history of art (including the “new art history”) and film studies, and identify a new field of interdisciplinary scholarly practice.