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American Visual Cultures analyses the role of painting, photography, film, television, advertising, journalism and other visual media in the historical development of the United States from the Civil War to the present day. It offers a chronology of major debates and developments in modern US history and traces the social, political and economic factors that have shaped the development of visual forms and practices across time. Illustrated throughout, the book combines a wide range of critical approaches and is made up of new essays by internationally renowned scholars. A General Introduction, in which the editors discuss the theoretical and pedagogical approaches shaping the contemporary study of visual culture, with particular reference to the United States, is followed by four sections, each covering a defined chronological period: 1861-1929; 1929-1963; 1963-1980; 1980 to the present. Each section opens with an introduction by the editors, giving historical and cultural context and highlighting thematic and pedagogical links between essays. An annotated bibliography of suggested further reading completes this invaluable and unique resource for the student and teacher of modern American art, media and culture.
Visual culture - art, advertising, architecture, cinema, television, cartography, video, the internet and images of science - has shaped American national identity more than any other country. This book explores how visual culture has at once transformed and consolidated the image of the United States.
The fight for racial equality in the nineteenth century played out not only in marches and political conventions but also in the print and visual culture created and disseminated throughout the United States by African Americans. Advances in visual technologies--daguerreotypes, lithographs, cartes de visite, and steam printing presses--enabled people to see and participate in social reform movements in new ways. African American activists seized these opportunities and produced images that advanced campaigns for black rights. In this book, Aston Gonzalez charts the changing roles of African American visual artists as they helped build the world they envisioned. Understudied artists such as Robert Douglass Jr., Patrick Henry Reason, James Presley Ball, and Augustus Washington produced images to persuade viewers of the necessity for racial equality, black political leadership, and freedom from slavery. Moreover, these activist artists' networks of transatlantic patronage and travels to Europe, the Caribbean, and Africa reveal their extensive involvement in the most pressing concerns for black people in the Atlantic world. Their work demonstrates how images became central to the ways that people developed ideas about race, citizenship, and politics during the nineteenth century.
In analyses of tattoo contests, advertising, and modern primitive photographs, the book shows how images of tattooed bodies communicate and disrupt notions of gender, class, and exoticism through their discursive performances. Fenske suggests working within dominant discourse to represent and subvert oppressive gender and class evaluations.
Visual texts uniquely demonstrate the contested terms of American identity. In American Archives Shawn Michelle Smith offers a bold and disturbing account of how photography and the sciences of biological racialism joined forces in the nineteenth century to offer an idea of what Americans look like--or "should" look like. Her varied sources, which include the middle-class portrait, baby picture, criminal mugshot, and eugenicist record, as well as literary, scientific, and popular texts, enable her to demonstrate how new visual paradigms posed bodily appearance as an index to interior "essence." Ultimately we see how competing preoccupations over gender, class, race, and American identity were played out in the making of a wide range of popular and institutional photographs. Smith demonstrates that as the body was variously mapped and defined as the key to essentialized identities, the image of the white middle-class woman was often held up as the most complete American ideal. She begins by studying gendered images of middle-class domesticity to expose a transformation of feminine architectures of interiority into the "essences" of "blood," "character," and "race." She reads visual documents, as well as literary texts by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Pauline Hopkins, and Theodore Dreiser, as both indices of and forms of resistance to dominant images of gender, class, race, and national identity. Through this analysis Smith shows how the white male gaze that sought to define and constrain white women and people of color was contested and transformed over the course of the nineteenth century. Smith identifies nineteenth-century visual paradigms that continue to shape debates about the terms of American belonging today. American Archives contributes significantly to the growing field of American visual cultural studies, and it is unprecedented in explaining how practices of racialized looking and the parameters of "American looks" were established in the first place.
Navigating Visual Culture: Theoretical Perspectives on Visual Media brings together an eclectic collection of theory-driven readings to help students understand and navigate the visual culture in which they live. The selections in Section I explore the nature of the visual and how people identify what they see around them, ranging from basic color to visual codes translated by the brain. Section II features readings that address the way people interpret, explain, and understand visual culture, while the readings in Section III give an overview of the various ways people participate in visual culture, whether as members of a particular media tribe, consumers of advertising, or users of personal computers. Each reading is framed by an original introduction that explains its place and relevance in visual culture, and discerning questions to facilitate classroom discussion or serve as writing prompts. The anthology also provides recommendations for supplemental reading and viewing. Navigating Visual Culture is well-suited to undergraduate courses in mass media, and can also be used for upper division and graduate courses in visual culture and new media.
"A compelling and challenging work."—Frances K. Pohl, author of Framing America "Berger is unafraid to tackle the major issues, and this book shows it."—Bruce Robertson, author of Marsden Hartley and Reckoning with Winslow Homer "Berger, writing on topics as diverse as landscape photography and early film, pushes into fascinating issues of gender, race, and class with sensitivity, insight, and largely jargon-free analysis. Having made a mark as a key Eakins scholar, he promises to achieve a similar feat in Sight Unseen, getting us to rethink traditional material in a new light."—John Wilmerding, Christopher Binyon Sarofim Professor of American Art, Princeton University
This book explores the place of art in Latter-day Saint society during the first 50 years of the Utah settlement, beginning in 1847. Nathan Rees uncovers the critical role that images played in nineteenth-century Mormon religion, politics, and social practice. These artists not only represented, but actively participated in debates about theology, politics, race, gender, and sexuality at a time when Latter-day Saints were grappling with evolving doctrine, conflict with Native Americans, and political turmoil resulting from their practice of polygamy. The book makes an important contribution to art history, Mormon studies, American studies, and religious studies.
In the past fifty years, the study of indigenous and pre-Columbian art has evolved from a groundbreaking area of inquiry in the mid-1960s to an established field of research. This period also spans the career of art historian Esther Pasztory. Few scholars have made such a broad and lasting impact as Pasztory, both in terms of our understanding of specific facets of ancient American art as well as in our appreciation of the evolving analytical tendencies related to the broader field of study as it developed and matured. The essays collected in this volume reflect scholarly rigor and new perspectives on ancient American art and are contributed by many of Pasztory’s former students and colleagues. A testament to the sheer breadth of Pasztory's accomplishments, Visual Culture of the Ancient Americas covers a wide range of topics, from Aztec picture-writing to nineteenth-century European scientific illustration of Andean sites in Peru. The essays, written by both established and rising scholars from across the field, focus on three areas: the ancient Andes, including its representation by European explorers and scholars of the nineteenth century; Classic period Mesoamerica and its uses within the cultural heritage debate of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; and Postclassic Mesoamerica, particularly the deeper and heretofore often hidden meanings of its cultural production. Figures, maps, and color plates demonstrate the vibrancy and continued allure of indigenous artworks from the ancient Americas. “Pre-Columbian art can give more,” Pasztory declares, and the scholars featured here make a compelling case for its incorporation into art theory as a whole. The result is a collection of essays that celebrates Pasztory’s central role in the development of the field of Ancient American visual studies, even as it looks toward the future of the discipline.
In Latin America, where even today writing has remained a restricted form of expression, the task of generating consent and imposing the emergent nation-state as the exclusive form of the political, was largely conferred to the image. Furthermore, at the moment of its historical demise, the new, 'postmodern' forms of sovereignty appear to rely even more heavily on visual discourses of power. However, a critique of the iconography of the modern state-form has been missing. This volume is the first concerted attempt by cultural, historical and visual scholars to address the political dimension of visual culture in Latin America, in a comparative perspective spanning various regions and historical stages. The case studies are divided into four sections, analysing the formation of a public sphere, the visual politics of avant-garde art, the impact of mass society on political iconography, and the consolidation and crisis of territory as a key icon of the state. Jens Andermann is a Lecturer in Latin American Studies at Birkbeck College, London, and co-editor of the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies. Among his publications are Mapas de poder: una arqueología literaria del espacio argentino (Rosario, 2000) and articles for major journals in Argentina, Brazil, Europe and the US. William Rowe is Anniversary Professor of Poetics at Birkbeck College, London. His book Memory and Modernity: Popular Culture in Latin America (London, 1991) has been translated into several languages. His most recent works, apart from translations of a wide range of Latin American poetry, are Poets of Contemporary Latin America: History and the Inner Life (Oxford, 2000) and Ensayos vallejianos (Berkeley and Lima, 2006).