This book explores how the comparative analysis of visual cultural artefacts, from objects to architecture and fiction films, can contribute to our understanding of everyday life in homes and cities around the globe. Investigating the multiple facets of the everyday, this interdisciplinary collection generates a new awareness of everyday lives across cultures and challenges our traditional understanding of the everyday by interweaving new thematic connections. It brings together debates around the analysis of the everyday in visual culture more broadly and explores the creation of innovative technological methods for comparative approaches to the study of the everyday, such as film databases, as well as the celebration of the everyday in museums. The volume is organized around four key themes. It explores the slices of everyday lives found in Visual Culture (Part I), Museums (Part II), the City (Part III) and the Home (Part IV). The book explores the growing area of the analysis of everyday life through visual culture both broadly and in depth. By building interdisciplinary connections, this book is ideal for the emerging community of scholars and students stemming from Visual Culture, Film and Media Studies, Architecture Studies and practice, Museum Studies, and scholars of Sociology and Anthropology as well as offering fresh insights into cutting-edge tools and practices for the rapidly growing field of Digital Humanities.

America in the 1950s: the world was not so much a stage as a setpiece for TV, the new national phenomenon. It was a time when how things looked--and how we looked--mattered, a decade of design that comes to vibrant life in As Seen on TV. From the painting-by-numbers fad to the public fascination with the First Lady's apparel to the television sensation of Elvis Presley to the sculptural refinement of the automobile, Marling explores what Americans saw and what they looked for with a gaze newly trained by TV. A study in style, in material culture, in art history at eye level, this book shows us as never before those artful everyday objects that stood for American life in the 1950s, as seen on TV.

The author traces the history and theory of visual culture asking how and why visual media have become so central to contemporary everyday life. He explores a wide range of visual forms, including painting, sculpture, photography, television, cinema, virtual reality, and the Internet while addressing the subjects of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, the body, and the international media event that followed the death of Princess Diana.

Fascinated by the myth of the Russian avant-garde and scornful of official art, the West has been selective in its engagement with Russian visual culture. Yet how do contemporary Russian scholars and critics themselves approach the history of visual culture in the former Soviet Union? Taking its title from a Russian word that can refer to the 'texture" of life, painting, or writing, this anthology assembles thirteen key essays in art history and cultural theory by Russian-language writers. The essays erase boundaries between high and low, official and dissident, avant-garde and socialist realism, art and everyday life. Everything visual is deemed worthy of analysis, whether painting or propaganda banners, architecture or candy wrappers, mass celebrations or urban refuse. Most of the essays appear here in English for the first time. The editors have selected works of the past twenty years by philosophers, literary critics, film scholars, and art historians. Also included are influential earlier essays by Mikhail Bakhtin, V. N. Voloshinov, and Sergei Eisenstein. Compiled for general readers and specialists alike, Tekstura is a valuable resource for anyone interested in Russian and Soviet cultural history or in new theoretical approaches to the visual.

Popular and Visual Culture: Design, Circulation and Consumption is a transnational project that fosters a dialogue with multiple origins, both in geographical and academic terms. From the onset, this book questions the concepts of visual and popular culture, terms which are currently applied both to describe scientific fields, as operative concepts in theoretical discourse, and to characterize specific cultural contexts. The book’s analysis and categorization of visual and popular culture pursues discourses and practices which mark different historical eras and shape social orders. Because popular iconic and written productions are the outcome of a network of political, economic, ideological and social circumstances that are often hardly detectable and too taken for granted to be critically recognized, even by those who draw, paint or write (and live) under their influence. That is why visual figurations of popular culture should be studied as the support of a deeply motivated symbolic discourse on the values shared by a community. This book deals, in a way or another, with how popular and visual artefacts and sceneries are socially built, preserved and/or contested. The volume brings together, not only different disciplinary perspectives, but also diverse empirical phenomena, while approaching the wide subject of visuality and popular culture.

International in scope, this volume brings together leading and emerging voices working at the intersection of contemporary art, visual culture, activism, and climate change, and addresses key questions, such as: why and how do art and visual culture, and their ethics and values, matter with regard to a world increasingly shaped by climate breakdown? Foregrounding a decolonial and climate-justice-based approach, this book joins efforts within the environmental humanities in seeking to widen considerations of climate change as it intersects with social, political, and cultural realms. It simultaneously expands the nascent branches of ecocritical art history and visual culture, and builds toward the advancement of a robust and critical interdisciplinarity appropriate to the complex entanglements of climate change. This book will be of special interest to scholars and practitioners of contemporary art and visual culture, environmental studies, cultural geography, and political ecology.

On Not Looking: The Paradox of Contemporary Visual Culture focuses on the image, and our relationship to it, as a site of "not looking." The collection demonstrates that even though we live in an image-saturated culture, many images do not look at what they claim, viewers often do not look at the images, and in other cases, we are encouraged by the context of exhibition not to look at images. Contributors discuss an array of images—photographs, films, videos, press images, digital images, paintings, sculptures, and drawings—from everyday life, museums and galleries, and institutional contexts such as the press and political arena. The themes discussed include: politics of institutional exhibition and perception of images; censored, repressed, and banned images; transformations to practices of not looking as a result of new media interventions; images in history and memory; not looking at images of bodies and cultures on the margins; responses to images of trauma; and embodied vision.