This forward-thinking collection brings together over sixty essays that invoke images to summon, interpret, and argue with visual studies and its neighboring fields such as art history, media studies, visual anthropology, critical theory, cultural studies, and aesthetics. The product of a multi-year collaboration between graduate students from around the world, spearheaded by James Elkins, this one-of-a-kind anthology is a truly international, interdisciplinary point of entry into cutting-edge visual studies research. The book is fluid in relation to disciplines; it is frequently inventive in relation to guiding theories; it is unpredictable in its allegiance and interest in the past of the discipline--reflecting the ongoing growth of visual studies.

This book uncovers an underlying dispute over the role images play in contemporary society and, consequently, over their values and purposes. Two decades after the concepts of the pictorial and the iconic turn changed our vernacular involvement with regard to images, it has become clear that it was not only a newly discovered social, political or sexual construction of the visual field that brought turbulence into disciplinary knowledge, but that images have their own “pictorial logic” with powers exceeding those that are purely iconic or visually discernible. Instead of underscoring previously defined concepts of the picture, the contributors to this book view visual studies and Bildwissenschaft “merely” as a place for the theory of images, making a case for the hotly-debated topic of their powers and weaknesses on the one hand, and of their respective theories on the other. Therefore, as the title indicates, this book theorizes images, but it does not present a theory of images, because visual studies cannot lead to a unified theory of images unless a unified ontology of images can be agreed upon first. Although that would be a different task altogether, all the contributions in this book (in different ways and at different paces), by theorizing images in their aesthetic, historical, media and technological guises, pave the way for the future of visual culture and for the image science that will make this future more comprehensible.

What is cultural about vision--or visual about culture? In this ambitious book, Whitney Davis provides new answers to these difficult and important questions by presenting an original framework for understanding visual culture. Grounded in the theoretical traditions of art history, A General Theory of Visual Culture argues that, in a fully consolidated visual culture, artifacts and pictures have been made to be seen in a certain way; what Davis calls "visuality" is the visual perspective from which certain culturally constituted aspects of artifacts and pictures are visible to informed viewers. In this book, Davis provides a systematic analysis of visuality and describes how it comes into being as a historical form of vision. Expansive in scope, A General Theory of Visual Culture draws on art history, aesthetics, the psychology of perception, the philosophy of reference, and vision science, as well as visual-cultural studies in history, sociology, and anthropology. It provides penetrating new definitions of form, style, and iconography, and draws important and sometimes surprising conclusions (for example, that vision does not always attain to visual culture, and that visual culture is not always wholly visible). The book uses examples from a variety of cultural traditions, from prehistory to the twentieth century, to support a theory designed to apply to all human traditions of making artifacts and pictures--that is, to visual culture as a worldwide phenomenon.

Each of the five volumes in the Stone Art Theory Institutes series brings together a range of scholars who are not always directly familiar with one another’s work. The outcome of each of these convergences is an extensive and “unpredictable conversation” on knotty and provocative issues about art. This fifth and final volume in the series focuses on the identity, nature, and future of visual studies, discussing critical questions about its history, objects, and methods. The contributors question the canon of literature of visual studies and the place of visual studies with relation to theories of vision, visuality, epistemology, politics, and art history, giving voice to a variety of inter- and transdisciplinary perspectives. Rather than dismissing visual studies, as its provocative title might suggest, this volume aims to engage a critical discussion of the state of visual studies today, how it might move forward, and what it might leave behind to evolve in productive ways. The contributors are Emmanuel Alloa, Nell Andrew, Linda Báez Rubí, Martin A. Berger, Hans Dam Christensen, Isabelle Decobecq, Bernhard J. Dotzler, Johanna Drucker, James Elkins, Michele Emmer, Yolaine Escande, Gustav Frank, Theodore Gracyk, Asbjørn Grønstad, Stephan Günzel, Charles W. Haxthausen, Miguel Á. Hernández-Navarro, Tom Holert, Kıvanç Kılınç, Charlotte Klonk, Tirza True Latimer, Mark Linder, Sunil Manghani, Anna Notaro, Julia Orell, Mark Reinhardt, Vanessa R. Schwartz, Bernd Stiegler, Øyvind Vågnes, Sjoukje van der Meulen, Terri Weissman, Lisa Zaher, and Marta Zarzycka.

W.J.T. Mitchell – one of the founders of visual studies – has been at the forefront of many disciplines such as iconology, art history and media studies. His concept of the pictorial turn is known worldwide for having set new philosophical paradigms in dealing with our vernacular visual world. This book will help both students and seasoned scholars to understand key terms in visual studies – pictorial turn, metapictures, literary iconology, image/text, biopictures or living pictures, among many others – while systematically presenting the work of Mitchell as one of the discipline's founders and most prominent figures. As a special feature, the book includes three comprehensive, authoritative and theoretically relevant interviews with Mitchell that focus on different stages of development of visual studies and critical iconology.

In his latest book, James Elkins offers a road map through the field of visual studies, describing its major concerns and its principal theoretical sources. Then, with the skill and insight that have marked his successful books on art and visuality, Elkins takes the reader down a side road where visual studies can become a more interesting place. Why look only at the same handful of theorists? Why exclude from one's field of vision non-Western art or the wealth of scientific images?

Introduction: Science in Captivity -- The Skin Apparatus: Seeing Difference -- Skin Problems: Seeing Pain -- The Skin of Architecture -- Bioethics and the Skin of Words -- Coda: War Wounds.

" This collection of classic essays in the study of visual culture fills a major gap in this new and expanding intellectual field. Its major strength is its insistence on the importance of three central aspects of the study of visual culture: the sign, the institution and the viewing subject. It will provide readers, teachers and students with an essential text in visual and cultural studies." - "Janet Wolff, University of Rochester""" Visual Culture: The Reader provides an invaluable resource of over 30 key statements from a wide range of disciplines. Although underpinned by a focus on contemporary cultural theory, this reader puts issues of visual culture and the rhetoric of the image at centre stage. Divided into three parts, The Culture of the Visual, Regulating Photographic Meaning, Looking and Subjectivity, this reader enables students to make hitherto unmade connections across art, film and photography history and theory, semiotics, history, semiotics and communications, media studies, and cultural theory. The key statements are from the work of: Visual Culture: The Reader sets the agenda for the study of Visual Culture and will be an essential sourcebook for researchers and students alike.This is the reader for the module "The Image and Visual Culture" (D850) - part of The Open University Masters in Social Sciences Programme.

This important collection makes a compelling argument for the importance of theory in Native studies. Within the field, there has been understandable suspicion of theory stemming both from concerns about urgent political issues needing to take precedence over theoretical speculations and from hostility toward theory as an inherently Western, imperialist epistemology. The editors of Theorizing Native Studies take these concerns as the ground for recasting theoretical endeavors as attempts to identify the larger institutional and political structures that enable racism, inequities, and the displacement of indigenous peoples. They emphasize the need for Native people to be recognized as legitimate theorists and for the theoretical work happening outside the academy, in Native activist groups and communities, to be acknowledged. Many of the essays demonstrate how Native studies can productively engage with others seeking to dismantle and decolonize the settler state, including scholars putting theory to use in critical ethnic studies, gender and sexuality studies, and postcolonial studies. Taken together, the essays demonstrate how theory can serve as a decolonizing practice. Contributors. Christopher Bracken, Glen Coulthard, Mishuana Goeman, Dian Million, Scott Morgensen, Robert Nichols, Vera Palmer, Mark Rifkin, Audra Simpson, Andrea Smith, Teresia Teaiwa

What precisely, W. J. T. Mitchell asks, are pictures (and theories of pictures) doing now, in the late twentieth century, when the power of the visual is said to be greater than ever before, and the "pictorial turn" supplants the "linguistic turn" in the study of culture? This book by one of America's leading theorists of visual representation offers a rich account of the interplay between the visible and the readable across culture, from literature to visual art to the mass media.