Visual Culture Revisited

Is there one visual culture or are there multiple visual cultures? On the one hand, it is obvious that images do not exist and cannot be understood independently. Rather, they are embedded in institutions and cultural contexts. This common ground suggests an understanding of visual culture as a singular phenomenon. On the other hand the plurality of pictorial representations - from Sitcoms to illustrations in childrens' books, from cartoons to satellite photos, from high art to everyday life - suggests the conception of visual culture as a singular phenomenon to be misleading. The visual world is a field of conflict and tension between self and other, mainstream and counterculture.



The articles in this book include both theoretical reflections on the dialectics of visual culture(s) as well as case studies. The focus lies on examples from the U.S. American context - from the focusing on Native Americans as the 'Vanishing Race' in the 19th-century Photography to the TV coverage of the Columbia Space Shuttle Disaster in February, 2003. This book is therefore highly recommendable to both students and scholars of American Studies als well as those interested in the interdisciplinary debate on visual culture(s).



Preface



I. Production of Knowledge in Visual Culture



Dimitri Liebsch

Pictorial Turn and Visual Culture



Ralf Adelmann

Digital Visualizations and the Production of Knowledge in Television News



Jessica Buben

The Psychedelic Sewing Room



II. Politics of Pictures



Janusz Kazmierczak

The Politics of the Visual in the American Alternative Press of the 1960s



Stefanie Schneider

›Stop them damned pictures!‹ - Political Cartoons, Visual Culture and the Construction of Anglo-American Relations



Nic Leonhardt

Pictorial (Hi)stories - Illustrated Coverage of the Franco-Prussian War 1870/71



Andreas Fahr

Expressing the Inexpressible: u.s. and German Coverage of the School-Shootings in Littleton and Erfurt



III. Imaginary Discourses - Discourses of the Image



Walter C. Metz

From Plato's Cave to bin Laden's: The ›Worst Sincerity‹ of Ron Howard's The Missing (2003)



Bettina Lockemann

Constructing the World: Documentary Photography in Artistic Use



Claudia Olk

Vagueness, Vision, and the Veil - Perceptual Indeterminacy in Modernist Fiction



Ines Katenhusen

The ›Living Museum‹: The Work of Alexander Dorner (1893-1957)



Birgit Däwes

James Luna, Gerald Vizenor, and the ›Vanishing Race‹: Native American Performative Responses to Hege(mne)monic Image Construction



V. Image, Identity, and Alterity



Ingrid Gessner

Erasure and Visual Recovery: Displaying Japanese American Internment Experiences



Steven Hoelscher

Photography as Social and Economic Encounter: The Visual Culture of Nineteenth-Century Native American Pictures



Geneviève Susemihl

The Visual Construction of the North American Indian in the World of German Children



Contributors

Index