The constant gardener
Visual culture
Justin Armstrong,
McMaster University
Visual culture is a term used to describe those elements of human cultural production that
are perceived and interpreted primarily through visual means (such as film, painting,
advertisements, and graffiti). The term also denotes the multi-disciplinary field of study
that has grown up around visual examinations of human culture. The practice of understanding
and analyzing visual culture relies largely on understanding the ways in which various
visual elements relate to one another and shape the ways in which society perceives them.
Visual culture also acts as a type of "catch-all" discipline for conceptualizing the
multitude of images that we are presented with every day. The concept of visual culture also
provides a unique angle from which to approach the notion of visual hybridity (the collage
effect common to many current forms of imagery) that has become symptomatic of a society
that places such a great importance on the image. Since there are literally billions of
images in existence, it becomes impossible to absorb them on an individual basis —
eventually they begin to blur together and hybridize in a mass of imagery that seems to be
endlessly multiplying. This process often leads to visual fatigue or confusion.
The idea of visual culture is what John Berger has called a "way of seeing," — that
is, a means of looking at the visual world through our own social, cultural, and ideological
lenses. It is the study of the visual event, an instance of visual production that requires
some type of analysis regarding its motive, origin, appearance, effect, and relationship to
the viewer. Visual culture represents the convergence of human understandings about both
what we see and how we see it.
Image courtesy of Geoffrey Rockwell from Dictionary of
Words in the Wild with permission.
Since visual culture is a relatively new field, some of the boundaries and definitions of
this form of inquiry are still unclear. Much of the debate centers around the understandings
of visual culture and visual studies with many theorists maintaining that visual culture
refers to the object while visual studies refers to the discipline. Still, some have argued
that visual studies is a melting pot of unrelated theory that is used to relate unrelated
ideas. Other writers like Gillian Rose present a different dichotomy where vision (the
biological process of taking light into the eye) is opposed to visuality (the cultural
process of understanding vision and the way we interpret what we see). Regardless of how it
is divided or classified, visual culture most accurately refers to the ways in which we
perceive and understand the visual world that surrounds us.
In this increasingly globalized world, visual culture has become an important area of study
in universities the world over. Since culture can often be divided along linguistic lines,
the visual language of logos, icons, brand images and visual media like television, the
Internet and film has become the new global language — a language that everyone
with access to popular media speaks. Logos stand in for ideas and a new alphabet of branding
and entertainment emerges. From Nike to McDonald's to the face of Julia Roberts or George
Clooney, the global language of popular imagery crosses all political and linguistic
boundaries. It is this aspect of visual culture that has led to such a rapid rate of
cultural flow across the surface of the globe. Aided by mass media and the sheer multitude
of images that is available for consumption and interpretation, visual culture has acted as
one of the primary change agents in the move towards a globalized world.
