Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual Materials

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It was published in 2020 by Verso, and there’s a great collection of videos of Legacy talking about the book and its concerns here. Furthermore, lots of good citations here that make referencing the more applicable methods a lot faster. Naturally, it can go overboard – but I do think it gives some ‘grounding’ to any study to use some of the methods outlined here. They also depend on the pleasure, thrills, fascination, wonder, fear or revulsion of the person looking at the Images and then writing about them. But one reason to see Dune on the big screen is to relish the scale of just a few big things in a frame rather than every scene jostling with endless detail (see also Nope).

As Gaboury convincingly argues, computer graphics are mathematical and spatial objects first, that are then made visible; they are not inherently visual.This is important because images are embedded in the wider culture and therefore reflect while also helping to form that culture. But Glitch Feminism – which is brilliantly written – kind of just sidesteps those analyses and starts from a life – a body, Russell’s – the formation of which has been inextricably affected by the many other bodies she’s encountered online.

I went to see the exhibition Beyond the Page: South Asian Miniature Painting and Britain, 1600 to Today yesterday, at MK Gallery in Milton Keynes. And there are situations in which embodied engagement with images remains absolutely pivotal (as our TRAVIS team discussion emphasised – Kat Tiidenberg is our project lead). Rather, there is a wall-size screen with a selection of aerial urban views of exactly the same kind that property developers now frequently use to sell their apartments: a view from on high of a city at dusk, lit buildings twinkling like urban fairy lights. Maximal are those movies and series which go all-out for mega-detail at every scale, like Wakanda Forever. The introduction isolates which viewpoints the author will take up and provides an explanation of organization.

The construction of scientific knowledges about the world has become more and more based on images rather than on written texts. We surely need to theorise digital visual culture in ways that could include the huge variety of different kinds of softimages and their diverse effects – like digital twins, for example, or movie VFX – rather continuing to generalise from the invisuality of social media platforms, important as that is. Whereas one of the reasons I so much enjoyed Andor, and Denis Villeneuve’s version of Dune, is that their VFX are somehow much more minimal. And, as she repeatedly points out, it is impossible to spend too much time looking at the images you are going to interpret. What this book seeks to provide readers with is, “Some guidelines for investigating the meanings and effects of visual images.

In addition, the discussion of visual and digital technologies and their associated practices have been updated. The book explores the different ′politics of sentiment′ in which family snaps participate in both their domestic spaces in the public space of the contemporary mass media. Semiology is the next chapter and, as she says, it is “centrally concerned with the social effects of meaning”. The new edition of Gillian Rose's bestselling critical introduction to the study and analysis of visual culture has been fully revised and updated.

Surveillance – particularly of a kind which is essentially ‘self-surveillance’ – is terribly important to Foucault, as it shows how institutions impose their power on people in ways that are not immediately obvious or obnoxious. Chapter four is the last chapter that looks at the proposed principals of visual theory, where the rest of the text either involves case studies or cultural intersections. Gillian was awarded her PhD from the University of London in 1990 and has also taught at the University of London and Edinburgh University. This is done largely through a number of geometric operations, but photographs continue to be used in various ways in many digital twins as part of this effort to model the ‘real’ city.