Visual Culture
Code
711011060
Academic unit
Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas
Department
Ciências da Comunicação
Credits
6
Teacher in charge
Maria Margarida Godinho
Weekly hours
4
Teaching language
Portuguese
Objectives
The program of Visual Culture aims to develop a critical approach of images in an occidental context, aims to give an insight about the connections between visual experience, communication and culture and also about the way art is deeply related to a certain visual culture, while we cannot mistaken the both. In this sense this discipline would stress an analytical and critical approach of different visual objects in which different levels of content are intersected (esthetical, artistic, mass medial) and upon different media. This program will privilege an interdisciplinary and integrative analysis, paying attention to the possible development of a visual literacy in an academic context which can complement the main and traditional skill, the written word.
The objectives are::
1.Students must understand the concept of visual culture, in its connections with related areas as Visual studies and Cultural Studies:
2.Student shall be able to analyse some paradigmatic examples of the relation between art and visual culture;
3.Student will acquire visual literacy, developing a critical thought about images and their production and diffusion;
4.He will know the main concepts in the theoretical field and can use them;
5.He will recognize and interpret models of visual representation in their relation to cultural contexts and specific communication contexts;
6.He will be able of recognizing his own visual culture and analyse it.
Prerequisites
None
Subject matter
1.What is Visual Culture? Origin of the term and delimitation. Exploring the concept of Culture.
2.Visual Culture and Modernity
2.1. The rising of a visual culture: the case of Renascence
2.2. Vision, perception, and attention: western occularcentrism since 1800
2.3. Culture, technical image and modernity: from the camera obscura to photography and cinema
2.3.1. The camera obscura in 19th century visual culture
2.3.2. The Phantasmagoria
2.3.3. Photography
2.3.4. Cinema
3.Sense and paradox of images
3.1. The document-image and the question of realism
3.1.1. The ontology of the photographic image
3.1.2. Movies realism: The Man of the movie camera, Dziga Vertov
3.2. Technical Image and the search of non-realism
3.2.1. Spirit Photography
3.2.2. Surrealist composition
3.3. Image, memory, ideology
3.3.1. The case of the Iconography of Salpêtrière
3.3.2. Russian Constructivism
3.3.3. 20th century Photojournalism
3.3.4. Contemporary Visual Culture: the digital revolution and its consequences.
Bibliography
-BAXANDALL, Michael, Painting and Experience in XV century Italy, OXFORD, Oxford University Press, 1978
-MIRZOEFF, Michael (ed.), The visual culture reader, Routledge, 1999
-BARTHES, Roland (1961) A Mensagem Fotográfica, in Revista de Comunicação & Linguagens, nº 39, Junho de 2008.
-BAZIN, André (1945) Ontologia da Imagem Fotográfica, in Revista de Comunicação & Linguagens, nº 39, Junho de 2008.
-SEKULA, Alan SEKULA, Allan On the Invention of Photographic Meaning. Victor Burgin (ed) Thinking Photography. London: Macmillan, 1982, 84-109.
Teaching method
Teachers explanation with images support; theoretical and practical classes upon fundamental texts and debate around them.
Evaluation method
Presence in class;
Written paper upon a theme or a Review supervised by the teacher, with a max. 2500 words;
Written test.