The best books to begin the study of visual culture

Like most of Benjamin’s essays and books, "The Work of Art" essay is a dialectical study of the material conditions of the possibility of the work of art in the context of the conditions of modern reproduction techniques. Benjamin delineates a visual phenomenology of the essential features of the traditional artwork (its singularity in time and place, its disengagement from mundane experience, its provocation of thought and reflection, and its local `auratic’ presence). This frames the background to the question of the fate of art in an era where the singular work of art can be replicated and endlessly reproduced through technological means.

The artwork achieves a massive expansion in terms of audience reception and interpretation, but it is also stripped of its `aura’ and transgressive 'presence’. This analysis allows Benjamin to explore the impact of modernity upon structures of experience as a dialectical `loop’ that circles back upon the changing dynamic of visual life. It is this essay that uniquely focused cultural studies upon material and technological questions and, indirectly, provoked some of the most influential studies of visual modernity, among these Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects, Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, and Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation. 

In one sense Berger’s work is a further exploration of many of Benjamin’s ideas on the social functions of art and visual imagery. Berger is even more emphatic in underlining the changing social (and economic) imperatives that have created particular genres of art. In this book the main emphasis is Eurocentric as Berger weaves his story of the social logics of images into an account of the class and gendered character of the art world and, more particularly, of the world of paintings.

As a Marxist reading of the tradition Ways of Seeing emphasizes social class and dominant class relations as a formative way in which the visual world has been constructed. But he is `culturalist’ enough to stress the relative autonomy of the visual and cultural formations and how the conventions governing artworks and aesthetic interpretation have changed historically. Unusual in the theory of visual culture during the 1960s Berger has lengthy discussions of the role of gendered images of the human body, particularly the female nude. All of this pointed toward a much more reflexive hermeneutic open to diverse readings of the tradition and the continual `openness’ of the image and image cultures.

In contrast to John Berger’s Marxist aesthetic, Barthes’s approach to visual experience and photographic images draws upon the tradition of semiotics and, to a degree, postmodern theories of text and intertextuality. Barthes leads his reader into the codes and conventions of the image. How images signify is thus made a central topic that provokes self-reflection and reflexive challenges to conventional image analysis. Where Berger’s work is expository and analytic, Barthes's book is exploratory and novelistic (Barthes would have his reader approach the work as a kind of intertextual fiction). As the title of the work suggests, this is Barthes at his most personal and reflective. His fascination remains with the photographic image which is presented as one of the defining aesthetic objects of modernity. But the act of photography is now itself complex, mediated, and open to a range of concrete experiential impulses.

Here the viewer of the photograph is central to image reception and this `viewing gaze’ is also historically grounded and phenomenologically complex. Photographs are frozen moments charged with emotion and affective resonances. This kind of complexity is revealed in Barthes’s own reflections on the intimate significance of personal photographs. The image of his own recently deceased mother occupies a central part of the text. Barthes leaves the reader considering how a scratched image can be a consolatory object in the face of indescribable grief.

On Photography is Sontag’s attempt to develop the thought of Barthes, Benjamin, and others and apply the resultant perspective to the critical understanding of the fundamental role of photography in modern life. The book is constructed as a series of interconnected essays, each of which explores the moral and dialectical character of photographic interventions. Photography embodies the moral ambiguity of human activity: the camera claims to deliver truth but is essentially selective and partial; photography reveals and conceals the real; the photograph is an artificial mode of representation but claims to provide a `picture’ of life that can only be captured through the camera.

This ambiguous ontology of the image impacts upon both the act of image-making and the interpretive task of reading and understanding the image. With modern photography the viewer is constituted in a dual movement of separation (and alienation) and connectivity (and communality). Photographic engagement constitutes, so to speak, the renewal of fascination and, perhaps, `aura’ in the mass-produced photographic image. Dealing with the analogue camera, Sontag stood on the lintel between the world of art and journalistic media and the revolutionary development of mass-produced digital imagery.

The connections she identified prefigure questions that are now being explicitly addressed by contemporary visual theorizing: the global character of contemporary image-making, the extreme gendered nature of photography and alternative practice, the Eurocentric logic of image-worlds, the capitalist exploitation and commercialization of visual culture, the morality of 'stolen’ photographic images and archives, and so on. Despite these historical and theoretical limitations her essays retain their relevance in the current global transformation of image-mediated reality construction. 

Crary’s work provides a theoretical and empirically informed synthesis of the work of theorists like Berger, Debord, Baudrillard, Barthes, and Sontag. Like these earlier writers, the technological transformations of visual culture are at the heart of the social transformations of the modern world. To understand modernity is thus first to make sense of its visual logics, procedures, and practices. This general argument allowed the author to enter the granular historical details of how seeing and 'observation’ have become essential to the concerns of modern life. What he calls 'techniques of the observer’ are in fact the core sensory apparatus that has helped to shape the institutions and practices of modern life.

What can be visualized is correlated to the technical affordances and historical development of representational practices. This makes technologies of the visual central to social analysis. Some of the most powerful drivers of modern life are thus linked to the origin of the telegraph, photography, radio, television, the moving image, computation, the internet, and new social media. The strengths of Crary’s work lie in this integration of theoretical perspective with detailed investigations of some of the seminal technical innovations in observation and representation in the late nineteenth century. This is the period that created new 'subjects’ ('subjectivities’ and 'temporalities’), novel kinds of spectatorship, new forms of societal order, new disciplinary systems, and new ways of thinking about self and society.

The radical implication of Crary’s research is that if we are to continue this kind of critical work we must move to a radical political economy of the image that is now global and digitally transformed through the social media of the internet and corporate media platforms. The changes and problematics that shaped modernity in the nineteenth century have now entered the age of the post-modern and hyperreal world of global capitalism. The next phase of visual modernity lies in the impact of AI technology and robotic machine production, analysis, and dissemination of images. Some of these themes have now been addressed in his Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (1999), 24/17. Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (2014) and Scorched Earth. Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World (2022).