ABSTRACT
Photography constitutes a paradigm shift in how people negotiate the cultural tensions in visual culture between realism and abstraction. We provide a short historical analysis of realism in the social history of photography, including its impact on how realist aesthetics and capitalism each deploy light and color. In a section on film history, the chapter outlines how the early reception to film was perhaps too iconic for audiences at first, but then shifted across paradigmatic and syntagmatic relationships to develop narrative conventions, thanks to which cinema became a naturalized, artistic element of visual culture. These concepts are further developed in a discussion of the contrasts between cinema and television, and how the political economy of streaming video on demand affects aesthetics and narrative form. The final section explores how aspects of storytelling such as the male gaze, genre, and closure are used across a variety of visual mass media, including comics as serial art. We also provide a special supplement on the narrative conventions of film.
