Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual Materials

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This leads to the third idea which is that it isn’t just important how an image looks, but rather also how it is looked at, that is, its audience, both implied and actual. Finally, one of the many provocations in Jacob Gaboury’s book Image Objects – which is a history of early computer graphics – is its complete (I think) lack of reference to photographs. I’ve done some fairly abstract theorising about spatiality in particular, often drawing on Foucauldian and feminist arguments. If “the urban is the embodiment of difference and the machinic production of difference ” (Simone 2022: 16), how are digital technologies entangled in the emergence of urban difference? For all their very different formats and styles and effects, I think these two books complement each other beautifully.

Gillian also claims that each of these sites have three different modalities: technological, and compositional, social. We surely need to theorise digital visual culture in ways that could include the huge variety of different kinds of softimages and their diverse effects – like digital twins, for example, or movie VFX – rather continuing to generalise from the invisuality of social media platforms, important as that is. This kind of analysis has its limits, but it does show patterns that would be very hard to see otherwise – the details of the study of National Geographic, particularly in linking it to the race stuff going on in the US at the time, makes this point particularly clearly. Psychoanalysis: Use psychoanalytical lens (much of Lacan) to study images and audience of images and their gazes.Furthermore, what we see, is being interpreted through the lens of the reporter and scrutinised even further by our own worldview.

I have to admit I found The Rings of Power incredibly boring partly because it was so poorly written. It examines what images are trusted by young people across Europe, how health influencers try to create trust-worthy images, and what role the different platform affordances play. This chapter is particularly important because it the first place where ideology is discussed in a cultural context and attempts to lay bare what roles culture play in our understandings of meaning making in relation to images. One miniature has a crowd of very European angels lurking in its clouds for example; there’s also a large canvas by a seventeenth-century Dutch painter bringing the Netherlandish ‘art of describing’ to Mughal carriages made of composite images. And also, lots of the digital scholarship I’ve been reading recently – in urban studies, media studies and so on – focuses on platforms and takes a strongly marxist and/or materialist analysis.

Professor Gillian Rose contributes to a number of undergraduate and postgraduate modules in the School. Discourse Analysis II: studies institutions that produce artifacts and the ways in which the artifacts are used.

It’s kind of heroic public art/messaging, but more suburban and, as Roland also showed with his image of a ‘family barbecue in a redwood valley’, with very traditional social content: white straight families, in Roland’s example. Media Arts Specialists’ License Cultural Practitioner, Publisher, 2022 Preliminary Candidacy Status for the Doctor of Divinity, D. But as various kinds of materialist scholars, or as media archeologists perhaps, they are also theorising from those realities, and Dewdney’s discussion of their analyses shows some of the implications of extending that theoretical position into a universal empirical description of “the politics of the image”.One long-term project, which resulted in a book from Ashgate Press in 2010, looked at family photos. What this book seeks to provide readers with is, “Some guidelines for investigating the meanings and effects of visual images.

These might be positioned as the next stage of cyber/intelligent/smart cities, but rather than gathering data via city dashboards in smart control centres, they integrate real-time big data about a city into a three-dimensional digital model of that city. These are linked together by codes, or ways of knowing, and because there is an arbitrary, but socially conventional, link between the signifier and the signified, signs can be made to ‘comment’ on each other – that is, transfer their meanings between each other. We tend to like to think that because we live in a ‘visual’ society – and one that is increasingly visual in orientation (film, television, YouTube, and endless advertisements in every possible location) that the ‘language’ of images would be something that would be quite transparent to us. With vibrancy, lucidity and energy, this stone-cold classic reaches its fifth and refreshed edition at just the right time.

Chapter 10 is not only focused on the observer, as it relates the life span of images often force shifting of meanings. Or that’s the theory anyway – as with cyber/intelligent/smart cities, there’s a lot of hype as well as some serious experimentation going on – experimentation which is not being carried out by social media platforms, nor always for profit…). I’m planning to use this book as part of the methodological underpinning of my PhD thesis – so this review will be a bit long and quote lots of this book – sorry about that, skip ahead as you feel you need to. Culture has faced multiple definitions and different manifestations in respond to historical development of human living condition. I’m going to try to be more active on this blog this year (I know I said that last year…) and reviews are one way to do that.