Brief History of Visual Studies
Seoul Temple, © David Jacobs
The emerging field of Visual Studies examines the production, reception, and interpretation of the aspects of culture that communicate through visual imagery. These include not only art, photography, and commercial imagery (including advertisements, popular film, and television), but also theatricality and performance and the visual display of information. In addition, the Visual Studies umbrella encompasses the use of visual sources in ethnographic and historical research.
The fields of Visual Studies emerged in the United States during the early 1970s, when such scholars as John Berger (Ways of Seeing, 1972) and Laura Mulvey (Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, 1975), drawing on such thinkers as Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, Guy Debord, Luce Irigaray, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida, brought the concepts of the gaze, surveillance, and spectacle into burgeoning fields of cultural, literary, and media studies.
The interdisciplinary study of Visual Studies gained added momentum during the 1980s and 1990s as a result of the work of W. J. T. Mitchell, the art historian and literary critic and author of such influential books as What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (2005), Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (1994), and Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology, and Martin Jay, whose Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century French Thought provided an intellectual history of visual culture, examining the ideas not only of the French scholars mentioned above, but also the writings of the Impressionist painters, Georges Bataille and the Surrealists, Roland Barthes's writings on photography, and the film theory of Christian Metz.
Cognitive science, the interdisciplinary study of the human mind, cognition, and the human sensory and perceptual apparatus, carried far-reaching consequences for the study of visual culture. By introducing new ways of thinking about consciousness, perception, emotion, and desire, rooted in neuroscience, perceptual psychology, and other disciplines, cognitive science had a profound influence on aesthetics and interpretation.
Key works on the impact of cognitive psychology on humanistic disciplines include Richard Gregory, John Harris, Priscilla Heard and David Rose, eds. The Artful Eye (1995); Daniel N. Osherson, Stephen M. Kosslyn, and John M. Hollerbach, Visual Cognition and Action (1990); Ilona Roth and Vicki Bruce, Perception and Representation (1995); and Robert L. Solso, Cognition and the Visual Arts (1994); and Semir Zeki. Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain (1999).
The use of visual sources in anthropology, history, and sociology greatly expanded beginning in the 1980s. The Society for Visual Anthropology, founded in 1984, promotes the use of images for the description, analysis, communication and interpretation of behavior. Also founded in the mid-1980s was Visual Studies, the journal of the International Visual Studies Association.
