Visual Communication and Culture Images in Action

A reader for undergraduate students enrolled in second- or third-year visual culture or visual communications courses offered via communication studies and cultural studies departments in universities and colleges nation-wide. Visual Communication and Culture: Images in Action uses a unique case-study approach to encourage students to critically examine the production and interpretation of images in their personal lives and across a variety of disciplines. Including eighteen selections from existing Canadian, UK, and US works across various disciplines, as well as an additional seven articles written specifically for this text, the twenty-four articles in this collection each emphasize that images are cultural productions. In addition, this volume includes nine easy-to-understand introductions to assist students in becoming visually literate consumers of images, with an understanding of how culture influences practices of visual communication and vice versa.

1 - 'Recapitulation', William M. Ivins, Jr
2 - 'The Visual Image: Its Place in Communication', E.H. Gombrich
3 - 'In Plato's Cave', Susan Sontag
4 - 'Blood and Circuses', Kate Cregan
5 - 'A Cultural Anatomy of the Visible Human Project', Lisa Cartwright
6 - 'Flesh in Wax: Demystifying the Skin Colours of the Common Crayon', Lorna Roth *
7 - 'Professional Vision', Charles Goodwin
8 - 'Visual Literacy in Action: "Law in the Age of Images"', Richard K. Sherwin
9 - 'The Pleasures of Looking: The Attorney General's Commission on Pornography versus Visual Images', Carole S. Vance
10 - 'The Suspicious and the Self-Promotional: About Those Photographs We Post on Facebook', Ira Wagman*
11 - 'Deconstructing the Map', J.B. Harley
12 - 'Mind the Gap: The London Underground Map and Users' Representations of Urban Space', Janet Vertesi
13 - 'Powell's Point: Denial and Deception at the UN', Jonathan Finn
14 - 'To Tell the Truth: Codes of Objectivity in Photojournalism', Dona Schwartz
15 - 'Photojournalism and the Tabloid Press', Karin E. Becker
16 - 'Miller's Crossing: War, Surrealism, and Vogue', Karen Engle*
17 - 'The Modern Art Museum: It's a Man's World', Carol Duncan
18 - '"Whiffs of Balsam, Pine, and Spruce": Art Museums and the Production of a Canadian Aesthetic', Anne Whitelaw
19 - 'The Mask Stripped Bare by Its Curators: The Work of Hybridity in the Twenty-First Century', Ruth B. Phillips
20 - 'Through a Canadian Lens: Discourses of Nationalism and Aboriginal Representation in Governmental Photographs', Carol Payne
21 - 'Votes for Stoves: Everywoman's World and the Canadian Citizen/Consumer in the Early Twentieth Century', Anne-Marie Kinahan*
22 - 'Meatballs Matters', Peter Urquhart*
23 - 'Television in the Family Circle', Lynn Spigel
24 - 'Virtually Live: Digital Broadcast Cinema and the Performing Arts', Paul Heyer*
25 - 'From Counting Calories to Fun Food: Regulating the TV Diet in the Age of Obesity', Stephen Kline and Jacqueline Botterill*

Jonathan Finn is an associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University and a member of the editorial board of Wilfrid Laurier University Press. He is the author of Capturing the Criminal Image: From Mug Shot to Surveillance Society (Minnesota, 2009), as well as numerous essays on surveillance, visual communication, and visual culture. His primary area of research is the history and theory of photography, with specific interest in institutional uses of the medium. He is currently developing a new research project on visual communication technologies and sport.