An Introduction to Visual Culture

Reviews / Votes

"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