Visual culture
Visual culture comprises images and visual practices through which people communicate, organize social life, and interpret the world.
Representation: The use of signs, images, or language to depict or evoke people, objects, and ideas. Visual culture makes meaning by representing the world rather than simply reproducing it.
Photography: The production of images by recording light, usually with a camera. Photography made mechanically produced images central to modern visual life.
John Berger: An English art critic, novelist, and essayist known for writing on art, photography, and ways of seeing. His work showed how images reflect social relations and inherited conventions.
Visual propaganda: Images designed to influence political attitudes or behavior. It makes visible how images can mobilize audiences and legitimize power.
Art history: The study of artworks in their historical, social, and material contexts. Visual culture extends beyond artworks to ordinary images and practices of seeing.
Visuality: The socially shaped ways in which seeing is organized, interpreted, and given authority. It links visual experience to the cultural rules that determine what can be seen.
Print culture: The social practices and institutions built around producing and circulating printed materials. Print technologies expanded the reach and repeatability of images.
Laura Mulvey: A British film theorist whose work analyzes spectatorship, gender, and cinema. Her account of the male gaze shaped debates about looking and representation.
Political iconography: The use and interpretation of images and symbols in political life. Political symbols organize public identities and communicate claims to authority.
Aesthetics: The philosophical study of beauty, art, and sensory experience. Visual culture centers social uses of images rather than aesthetic judgment alone.