MCS511 – Visions and Visualities, Fall 2019

Week 2 – Visual Culture As A Field of Study

Ekin Özek - 2058758

Very much like Mirzoeff’s article1, although being wider in scope, Walker and Chaplin’s Visual Culture:
An Introduction is also an attempt to introduce the reader to the field of Visual Studies, hence the title.
The first three chapters2 are aimed to survey a wide array of concepts related to culture and visuality,
define the limits of the study field and trace the origins of the discipline on the surface level. But unlike
the former article, this text identifies the purpose of the field of study differently:

“Visual culture is now so important in terms of the economy, business and new
technology, and such a vital part of virtually everyone’s daily experience, that
both producers and consumers would benefit from studying it in an objective
manner.” (p.3)

Despite stating that the emphasis on the visuality is what distinguishes Visual Culture Studies from
Media and Cultural Studies, and addressing that the systematic study of visual culture would indicate
“a critical understanding of it’s character, power and social functions and effects is the goal rather than
mere appreciation.” (p.3) ultimately the text demarcates the field as an politically ambivalent
academical endeavour which aims to benefit both the producer and consumer. I see this apolitical
positioning itself as political. And one can detect some other problematic points paralleling this
positioning through out the three chapters, as in their criticism towards the hierarchical conception of
culture as inadequate model in “doing justice to the complexity of contemporary society”.

Besides the mentioned political position, still the text mentions some crucial points.

First the differentiation of vision and visuality as the differentiation of the sense and the socially
informed interpretation lets us address the tense relationship between what we see and what we
know. This can be illustrated with the example of Russian avant-garde El Lissitzky’s poster Beat the
Whites with the Red Wegde.

Second, the unmediated vision and mediated vision distinction resulting with the seeing the world
and seeing the image as different experiences is important since the mediation creates a distance by
default if nothing else. Donna Ferato’s photograph Behind Closed Doors show a couple in their
bathroom in the middle of an physical altercation, and exemplifies the mentioned distance.

Third, the mediation leads to reconstruction of the world in different ways, meaning representations
of the world. These representations mark their ways of seeing onto the image and at the visual event,
the ways of seeing embedded in the image does collide with our ways of seeing. Thus, the meaning is

1
Mirzoeff, N. “Introduction: What is Visual Culture”, in An Introduction to Visual Culture. London: Routledge,
1999. pp.1-33.

2
Walker, J. & Chaplin S. “Chapter 1: Concepts of ‘Culture’“, “Chapter 2: The Concept of ‘Visual’” & “Chapter 3:
Visual Culture as a Field of Study and the Origins of Visual Culture Studies”, in Visual Culture: An
Introduction. UK: Manchester University Press, 1997. pp. 1-50
produced, in Bakhtinian sense, dialogically; not only by the images imposition, but our response and
negotiation with the image; resulting in an ongoing sociologic and political confrontation. Following
this, any aesthetic evaluation emerging at the end of this process would be inherently social and
political. In this context, Jean Dubuffet’s Tree of Bodily Fluids with its grotesque imagery of the women
body in contrast with Jean Auguste Domiinique Ingres’ Grande Odalisque with its orientalist gaze might
be meaningful to discuss in terms of the ways of seeing they impose and our response.