Picture Pedagogy

Visual Culture Concepts to Enhance the Curriculum

Paul Duncum

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781350144644
• eBook ISBN: 9781350144620
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Curricula

Contemporary societies are saturated with pictures. They are globally a part of everyday life, and they are seductive, offering values and beliefs in such highly pleasurable forms that it is often difficult to resist their power to persuade. Yet interpreting pictures is largely neglected in schools. Picture Pedagogy addresses this head on, showing that pictures can be used as a powerful form of classroom pedagogy. Duncum explores key concepts and curriculum examples to empower you to support students to develop a critical consciousness about pictures, whether teaching art, media, language or social studies. Drawing on the interpretive concepts of representation, rhetoric, ideology, aesthetic pleasure, intertextuality and the gaze, Duncum shows how you can develop your students' skills so that their power as viewers can match the power of pictures to seduce. Examples from the history of fine art and contemporary popular mass media, including Big Data and fake news, are drawn together and shown to be appealing to the same aesthetic pleasures. Often these pleasures are benign, but also problematic, helping to promote morally questionable ideas about a range of topics including gender, race and sexual orientation, and this is explored fully.

1

What is Visual Culture?

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Chapter Outline

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Defining visual culture

Visual culture today

Why is visual culture important?

Pictures and reality

Questions

Activities

Defining visual culture

Consider Figure 1.1, an illustration from the original children’s book on which the famous 1939 film The Wizard of Oz is based. Both the illustration and the movie are the kind of mass produced, popular pictures that many people think of when they read the term visual culture. In being popular, it is not considered very serious and perhaps it is even a little silly. But visual culture refers to a whole lot more. It refers to all kinds of pictures as produced, circulated and viewed in the context of often conflicting, deeply held beliefs and values. Visual culture is highly inclusive. It includes the fine arts of painting, drawing and sculpture and vernacular images like folk art and selfies. Of course, it also includes the popular mass media, including movies, movie posters, television, billboard advertising, magazine illustrations, video games, internet visual memes and so on. This is how visual culture is defined in this book. However, there are broader and different definitions, and it is useful to consider these other definitions to clarify how the term visual culture is employed here.

What is visual in visual culture?

To understand the breadth of visual culture, picture a pie chart that includes all the pictures produced and viewed in the entire world during the time you have been reading this chapter, in other words, in the last minute or so. This would be millions of pictures. Imagine dividing the pie chart into different categories of pictures, as with Figure 1.2.

Figure 1.1 W. W. Denslow. Book illustration. Dorothy meets the Cowardly Lion, from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900).

This would be an entirely speculative exercise regarding percentages but it would help to focus on what this book is concerned with and why. Approximately half the pie chart might consist of just one kind of image. Another section might be, let us say, 8 per cent, and another might be also 8 per cent. This leaves around 35 per cent. Two further categories might be considered to be 17 per cent each, which leaves a final category that is only 1 per cent.

While it is impossible to say whether these percentages are in any way accurate – there is surely no way of knowing – these speculative percentages allow a number of arguments to be made, including the relative social importance of the different categories and the extent to which they are of importance to readers of this book. Only some of these categories are relevant in this book because, ordinarily, only some categories are concerned with people’s beliefs and values.

Surveillance

As suggested by Figure 1.2, the first category, of approximately 50 per cent, consists of all the surveillance imagery. Cameras on surveillance satellites operate twenty-four hours a day. Think of how many hover over the Middle East, North Korea and other world trouble spots. And consider that today every heritage site, from China’s Forbidden City to Turkey’s Blue Mosque, is subject to surveillance cameras. Even walking down the aisles of a supermarket one is subject to visual surveillance. Even if one is tempted to steal something, we all know that we are being watched, and most of us have learned to internalize good civic behaviour. Most visual surveillance of streets, shopping malls and parking lots is designed to catch theft, vandalism or terrorism, although mostly what they catch is just adolescents behaving badly. In the 1970s, the French philosopher and historian Foucault (1977) described his then society as a society of surveillance. How much more relevant is this today than it was in the 1970s? However, these surveillance pictures are part of a discourse of criminality and terrorism, and in most cases they merely provide data to governmental authorities. Being concerned with mere raw data and not people’s beliefs and values, they are usually of no interest here.

Figure 1.2 All the pictures created in the world at any one time.

Scientific and medical pictures

The second and third categories, with around 8 per cent each are, respectively, scientific and medical pictures. Scientific imagery includes all the pictures beamed back to Earth from the surface of Mars, all the ways the Earth’s crust and weather are pictured, all the images that demonstrate how dinosaurs are imagined to have behaved, and so on. Medical images include X-rays, sonograms, nuclear imaging of organs and MRI imaging of the brain. Again, both scientific and medical images provide raw data, and, as such, do not involve values and beliefs, and, therefore, are ordinarily of no interest here.

Vernacular pictures

This leaves three more categories. The first of these categories are vernacular pictures – images created by ordinary untrained people for their own pleasure. This includes folk art, such as handcrafted goods like scrapbooking, embroidery and quilt making. For example, for centuries, paper cutting has been an inexpensive way to decorate homes in both Europe and Asia (Figure 1.3).

Figure 1.3 Anonymous, Chinese Paper Cut (no date)

While once enjoyed by many people as part of ordinary life, today such older forms of vernacular imagery are pursued by only a minority of people as a hobby. Only a few years ago, certainly in the developed world, vernacular pictures would have been a rather small category, but today the category of vernacular pictures also includes all the digital pictures we snap and upload to social networking sites, as well as all the pictures drawn from massive image banks and reused for people’s own purposes. These pictures are often invested with deep personal meaning, and consequently they do interest us here.

Mass media pictures

The next category, the second last, are the professionally produced pictures of the mass media, which include television, movies, video games, magazine and newspaper photographs and all forms of mass advertising. More than any other, mass media pictures are the ones that tell us stories, both fictional and non-fictional, which ground contemporary societies in a sense of themselves. Oral societies of long ago passed down social norms from one generation to another through story telling; today, the role of inculcating normative beliefs and values falls increasingly to mass media. Increasingly, mass media provides us with reference points for living.

Both vernacular images and mass media images are popular; one bubbles up from below and the other comes, as it were, from above. These are the images, vernacular and mass media, that most people are most aware of on an everyday basis.

Mass media pictures have become ubiquitous, so much a part of daily experience that they are to us almost like the water in which fish live. In the 1960s, the French theorist, Debord (1995), characterized his then contemporary society as a society of spectacle. For Debord, society was meditated not, as it had been for centuries, primarily through words but through pictures. Pictures, not words, had become the primary communication mode by which values and beliefs were conveyed and circulated. Once again, how much more relevant is this today, in the age of internet interactivity and numerous twenty-four-hour television channels, than it was in France more than five decades ago?

Web 1.1 Introducing Media Literacy

Fine art pictures

Just one final category is left, and perhaps it is even less than one per cent. This category includes all the pictures produced in all the art schools around the world as well as all the pictures viewed in all the world’s art museums and commercial art galleries. Today, the fine arts are a tiny percentage of the images produced and viewed at any one time. This is not to say that they are unimportant – as indicated below, their social importance is out of all proportion to their number – but it is to suggest their social marginality. The fine arts play only a minor role, if any, in most people’s everyday lives (if in this book there is an over-representation of fine art reproductions in relation to all other kinds of pictures that is only because, being old, they are copyright free).

We need to create an education relevant for today’s youth, and education cannot be restricted to the fine arts. As educators, we must address the kind of pictures that help our students form their ways of regarding themselves and their world. Yet the sheer number of pictures can be intimidating; far too many pictures appear of so many different kinds. Where is an educator to start?

Excluding many pictures from consideration

Although pictures are proliferating even as you read this chapter, their sheer amount need not be daunting to educators. While the field of Visual Culture Studies is highly inclusive of all the kinds of pictures mentioned above, educators in the humanities and social sciences – of art, language, social studies and media – to whom this book is addressed, need only be concerned with images that primarily refer to beliefs and values. By contrast, many of the images mentioned above refer only to data or raw information and are usually part of discourses unrelated to beliefs and values. Surveillance pictures are usually part of a discourse about crime and terrorism. In the same way, scientific pictures are ordinarily part of scientific description and analysis and decipherable only to scientists in their highly specialized fields. Medical images are likewise ordinarily concerned with the diagnosis and prognosis of medical conditions, and they are similarly unreadable to anyone but specialists in medicine. As indicated by Figure 1.4, most of the pictures produced today are not ordinarily concerned with social beliefs and values.

Figure 1.4 Beliefs and values versus data.

However, sometimes pictures that are ordinarily concerned with surveillance, scientific and/or medical data are infused with social beliefs and values. When such pictures enter the domains of the vernacular, the mass media or the fine arts, they invariably signify beliefs and values. But only then do they need to concern us. These exceptions are discussed later in the chapter.

What is culture in visual culture?

The visual part of visual culture contains many kinds of pictures. But what is culture? In English, culture has been called one of the two or three most complicated words in the language so it is important to understand how it is used here as well as how it is not used. Simply put, in this book, culture refers to artefacts, namely pictures, as mediators of social conflict. Culture is understood as pictures that embody multiple ways of life in perpetual struggle with one another.

Culture as fine art

By contrast, culture can mean high culture, an especially refined sensibility as well as the fine art works that are thought to sustain such refinement. This is a view of culture that first arose in reaction to the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth century and nineteenth century. It was critically im...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Copyright Key
• Using this book
• Introduction
• 1 What is Visual Culture?
• 2 Representation
• 3 Visual Rhetoric
• 4 The Pleasures of Aesthetic Seduction
• 5 Some Problems of Pleasure
• 6 Gazing and Glancing
• 7 Intertextuality
• 8 Picture Appraisal
• 9 Postmodern Curriculum 1: Intertextual Connections
• 10 Postmodern Curriculum 2: Movie Making
• Glossary
• Further Reading
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright