ABSTRACT
Before 1970 very few critical analyses of visual representations were made outside the realm of visual art. But that situation subsequently began to change. Photography and film have played a major part both in broadening the visual field available for analysis and in shaping recent critical approaches to visual representation. For nearly a hundred years the relationship of photography to visual art was hotly debated, and while photography has now become accepted as a flexible medium which acquires a different cultural status according to the context in which it is shown, the effect of this shifting cultural status has been that photographers partake of several worlds, whilst those who write about photographs and photography are also well placed to cross cultural boundaries. So photography tends to disturb the distinction between ‘Visual art’ and other social categories of visual representation; but so does the politicised concept of culture itself, for this treats both ‘photography as reportage’ and ‘fine art photography’, for example, as cultural production. Semiotic theory also tends to blur the boundary between art and ‘non-art’, since it focuses on communication as a social process, and treats visual art as one form of communication. Rather than rehearsing old debates about what visual representations count as art, semiotic theory explores how communication works at the visual level.
