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Recent years have seen a wealth of new scholarship on the history of photography, cinema, digital media, and video games, yet less attention has been devoted to earlier forms of visual culture. The nineteenth century witnessed a dramatic proliferation of new technologies, devices, and print processes, which provided growing audiences with access to more visual material than ever before. This volume brings together the best aspects of interdisciplinary scholarship to enhance our understanding of the production, dissemination, and consumption of visual media prior to the predominance of photographic reproduction. By setting these examples against the backdrop of demographic, educational, political, commercial, scientific, and industrial shifts in Central Europe, these essays reveal the diverse ways that innovation in visual culture affected literature, philosophy, journalism, the history of perception, exhibition culture, and the representation of nature and human life in both print and material culture in local, national, transnational, and global contexts.
'Visual Culture in Twentieth-Century Germany' explores a wide spectrum of visual media in 20th century Germany in their critical and social contexts. Contributors examine film, photography, cabaret performances, advertising, architecture, painting, dance, television, and cartography.
This volume examines the multi-faceted nature of German identity through the lens of myriad forms of visual representation from the Middle Ages to the present. A broad spectrum of visual culture is considered - from painting to sculpture, advertising to architecture, film to installation art - to offer new insights into the 'German Question'.
This multi-disciplinary collection of essays draws on various theoretical approaches to explore the highly visual nature of the Middle Ages and expose new facets of old texts and artefacts. The term 'visual culture' has been used in recent years to refer to modern media theory, film, modern art and other contemporary representational forms and functions. But this emphasis on visuality is not only a modern phenomenon. Discourses on visual processes pervade the works of medieval secular poets, theologians, and scholastics alike. The Middle Ages was a highly visual society in which images, objects, and performance played a dominant communicative and representational role in both secular and religious areas of society. The essays in this volume, which present various perspectives on medieval visual culture, provide a critical historical basis for the study of visuality and visual processes.
How does the visual nature of spectacle destabilize the political, challenge aesthetic convention and celebrate cultural creativity? This interdisciplinary volume explores the concept of spectacle in the German context, including critical interventions into exhibitions, architecture, cinema and photography from the Baroque to the contemporary.
At the end of the nineteenth century, Germany turned toward colonialism, establishing protectorates in Africa, and toward a mass consumer society, mapping the meaning of commodities through advertising. These developments, distinct in the world of political economy, were intertwined in the world of visual culture. David Ciarlo offers an innovative visual history of each of these transformations. Tracing commercial imagery across different products and media, Ciarlo shows how and why the “African native” had emerged by 1900 to become a familiar figure in the German landscape, selling everything from soap to shirts to coffee. The racialization of black figures, first associated with the Am...
Germany of the 1920s offers a stunning moment in modernity, a time when surface values first became determinants of taste, activity, and occupation: modernity was still modern, spectacle was still spectacular. Janet Ward's luminous study revisits Weimar Germany via the lens of metropolitan visual culture, analyzing the power that 1920s Germany holds for today's visual codes of consumerism.