Bringing together fourteen essays from sociology, cultural studies and critical theory, Visual Culture examines vision beyond the biological, and instead as an historically produced activity, shaped by institutions, technologies, social relations and systems of power.

The collection moves across advertising, cinema, photography, painting, television and urban space, investigating how images structure modern experience. James Donald reads the imagined cities of Metropolis and Blade Runner through anxieties about technology, labour and sexuality; Dick Hebdige traces Pop Art's relationship with the ordinary and the everyday; Andrew Barry considers how scientific instruments and visual records come to acquire the authority of evidence. Other contributions examine the flâneur, fractured subjectivity, Foucault's understanding of visibility, and the political uses of visual representation.

Published in 1995, the book belongs to a formative period in the development of visual culture studies, when the relationship between seeing, knowing and believing was being subjected to sustained theoretical scrutiny. A substantial collection for readers interested in how images participate in the construction of social reality.

Edition/Condition: Routledge, 1995 first edition, 1995 reprint. Paperback. Good condition, with light surface wear and minor marking to the white covers. Pages appear clean and binding intact.