Cultura visiva, studi visuali

With its emphasis on power and visuality, this introduction develops an interdisciplinary approach to visual culture that moves beyond treating images simply as objects of representation. It theorises the visual as a socially organised mode of seeing, distinguishing it from the visive and situating visuality within historically and culturally specific scopic regimes. Bringing together visual culture, technology, power, subjectivity and processes of production, circulation and appropriation, the text rejects both the neutrality of images and a postmodern dissolution of the distinction between representation and reality. It instead develops a relational approach attentive to unequal conditions of representing, differentiated ways of seeing and being seen, and the possibility of using images as both objects and instruments of social inquiry.