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3 Radical visual culture: from caricature to portraiture The previous chapter highlighted the importance of portraiture for shaping the identities of the political parties formed in the wake of the 1832 Reform Act. However, it was radicals who were consistently the most innovative in their exploitation of new visual technologies. This was no coincidence. Portraiture was even more valuable to radical movements, which frequently experienced media indifference or hostility. To counter this, radicals produced their own series to project their own self-image to
Introduction This chapter is grounded in a critique of the colonial values and imagination that persist in contemporary nation-states, often expressed in racism and exclusion observable as systematised devaluation of some humans. Racialisation takes many forms, perhaps most commonly in state implemented policies, laws, and administrative measures of dividing and categorising populations. While the political context is important in understanding the felt experience of racialisation, here, my focus is on the role of art, visual culture, and activist artists in
In the later Middle Ages visual culture – and access to it – was an expensive business. The end of the period witnessed the rise of a flourishing culture of reproduction, with widely affordable images in woodcuts and printed books. 1 But the most eye-catching developments in the visual arts remained the preserve of those with significant means – royalty and the
1 The visual culture of reform, 1830–32 This chapter examines the visual culture stimulated by the popular fervour for reform, and sheds new light on the making of the 1832 Reform Act and how it was perceived at the time. Prints and other forms of material culture presented reform as revitalising and restoring balance to a moribund constitution. Just as significantly, reform of the electoral system was linked to long-demanded calls for retrenchment in the state and reduced taxation. Reform would lead to the breaking up of the ‘Old Corruption’, the web of state
The issue of ethnicity in France, and how ethnicities are represented there visually, remains one of the most important and polemical aspects of French post-colonial politics and society. This is the first book to analyse how a range of different ethnicities have been represented across contemporary French visual culture. Via a wide series of case studies – from the worldwide hit film Amélie to France’s popular TV series Plus belle la vie – it probes how ethnicities have been represented across different media, including film, photography, television and the visual arts. Four chapters examine distinct areas of particular importance: national identity, people of Algerian heritage, Jewishness and France’s second city Marseille.
This book discusses early modern English drama as a part of visual culture. But what is visual culture, and why use this phrase in place of the ‘fine arts’ or the ‘visual arts’? In part, this choice is motivated by my concern with exploring the plays in their historical contexts. Shakespeare and his contemporaries would not have recognised the phrase ‘fine arts’. Nor would
9 ‘Critical social optics’ and the transformations of audio-visual culture PRELIMINARY NOTE I wanted to focus here on a particular form of photography, the prize-winning press image, but to go beyond the terms of analysis appropriate to exploring professional work of this kind and to look at the ways in which such images circulated on the web and became the subject of intensive and varied critical commentary. It seemed to me that the range and detail of some of this commentary contributed to an unprecedented situation in international visual culture. It made an
’ (32). Collins emphasises how modern visual culture interrogates ‘the physiological makeup of the human subject’ as new technologies became available (Crary, 1992 : 70). From the beginning of the novel, the succession of incomplete images which strike the hero’s senses already point to the gap between perception and its object: the former is not instantaneous but
, which would become an ‘icon of Third World suffering’, were the ‘watershed that turned the conflict into a global media event’ (9). It was neither the first nor the last time such images were used to draw Western attention to distant suffering. Indeed, the path-breaking collection Humanitarian Photography – which includes an essay by Heerten on Biafra – takes a longer view by gathering historians to analyse the visual culture of humanitarianism from the late nineteenth century to
Soaking up the rays forges a new path for exploring Britain’s fickle love of the light by investigating the beginnings of light therapy in the country from c.1890-1940. Despite rapidly becoming a leading treatment for tuberculosis, rickets and other infections and skin diseases, light therapy was a contentious medical practice. Bodily exposure to light, whether for therapeutic or aesthetic ends, persists as a contested subject to this day: recommended to counter psoriasis and other skin conditions as well as Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) and depression; closely linked to notions of beauty, happiness and well-being, fuelling tourism to sunny locales abroad and the tanning industry at home; and yet with repeated health warnings that it is a dangerous carcinogen. By analysing archival photographs, illustrated medical texts, advertisements, lamps, and goggles and their visual representation of how light acted upon the body, Woloshyn assesses their complicated contribution to the founding of light therapy. Soaking up the rays will appeal to those intrigued by medicine’s visual culture, especially academics and students of the histories of art and visual culture, material cultures, medicine, science and technology, and popular culture.