ABSTRACT
As a then newly emergent and interdisciplinary field, Visual Cultural Studies engaged with all kinds of visual information, its meanings, pleasures, and consumption, including the study of visual technologies, from oil painting to the internet. This essay, co-written with Martin Lister, posits Visual Cultural Studies not as a specific methodology but as an agenda for questions and issues for addressing images. Examples discussed range from mass media to art photography, from global cigarette advertising campaigns to documentary photographs of famine that, it is argued, contribute to constructing a Eurocentric view of Africa as a site of victims and disasters. Both through the examples and through engagement with the web as a then still relatively new site of visual circulation, the chapter is of interest in reflecting academic concerns of its era.
Grateful thanks to Martin Lister for agreeing to this inclusion.
