Visual Culture

The Visual Turn

In the latter half of the twentieth century, social and cultural sciences combed the world for seemingly mundane images in people's lives that spoke in powerful and subtle ways about the often hidden values and tacit assumptions woven into societies, joining efforts in many disciplines to democratize and appropriate popular, everyday objects for scholarly attention. Advertising, pasta labels, popular TV shows, and children's homework all became untapped repositories of the tacit values, desires, and limits of a particular culture. Such an enterprise formed part of the so-called cultural turn in social sciences—a period of thinking that involved a shift in emphasis, methods, and research philosophy.

From this perspective, meaning was not just something that was found or discovered, but it was produced through the objects people bought, sold, made, used and preserved, collected, discarded, and, of course, saw. Such an insight had major implications for image research, as critically minded theorists began to move away from the image-appreciation domains of art history to methods that would show how images carefully assembled their meanings to act as ideological vehicles. At the same time, researchers in consumer behavior and cultural studies turned their attention to advertising images as representation, shifting focus on persuasion and effectiveness to meaning and cultural importance.

By the mid-1980s, researchers agreed that cultural objects were “multimodal”: they had a textual and a visual component. For example, a bus ticket has a text written on it, but it also has an important visual dimension—its color, its typography, its shape, its logo and images. Study commenced on the visual dimension of artifacts such as sculpture, architecture, advertising, film, product packaging, music video, [Page 1507]painting, scientific maps, comic strips, and performance art. This research framework required new techniques to accommodate both the shift in research questions and the growing use of image technology.

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