Cultures of Vision

"This is a very strong, thought provoking volume by a scholar who has been thinking long and hard about the issues that define contemporary media studies (intersecting with cultural studies)...The issues are big ones, but they are addressed by fine-grained arguments and readings of major theorists and visual genres." - George Marcus. Late twentieth century culture is saturated with images. As home photographs shift from the print format to digital technology and as video moves from the television screen to multimedia, it is crucial to develop new strategies of interpreting and analyzing these images. Here Ron Burnett proposes that our culture's relationship to images is not as dependent on the activities of seeing or listening as we often presume. The assumption that to look means to see, or that to see means to understand, is derived from models of mind which conceive of human consciousness as a mirror of the world we inhabit. What stands between the eyes and knowledge? What makes a world seen or listened to, a world understood? The book moves along a trajectory that begins with photography and ends with an examination of postmodern media communities. Burnett studies video images - from the avant-garde to community media - to open up debate on the wide-spread and growing phenomenon of video practice. Does the distinction between alternative and mainstream culture help us understand the many different ways in which electronic images operate? Why is video so undertheorized in the literature of cultural studies and communications? Burnett also examines how cinema and photography have been incorporated into television. Our imaginations play a crucial role in freeing our thoughts, daydreams and intuitions as we engage in the complex activities of viewing and spectatorship. Seeing and listening are only two of the many facets of an embodied process which links viewing to gender, ethnicity, class and sexual preference. "Cultures of Vision" explores a new environment of imagination and images, technology and sight, politics and the recreation of community. It enters the dome of images and asks what can be done to map and control the direction in which our culture is heading.