Page 152 - Cultural Studies A Practical Introduction

11

Visual Culture

with Brett Ingram

Our life – for those of us with the gift of sight at least – is visual. We
know the world and live the world visually. The images in our eyes are
our most vivid engagement with the world around us, almost more vivid
than the words, sounds, and ideas in our minds – the other major contact
points between us and our cultural world. Those images come to us
from many sources – the news, movies, the Internet, magazines, and so
on. Each image is like a peephole in that it only affords us a very limited
vision of things that have a much greater amplitude. Most images come
to us as part of narratives, stories that pattern our experience of the
world in a temporal sequence that is also logical and is informed with
valuations. Images of the Taliban in Afghanistan or Pakistan depict them
as violent aggressors in a story of warfare with good and bad characters.
The logic of the story is moral, and the valuations embedded in it make
us experience the events depicted in a certain way. It is as if our everyday
experience of the world were not that different from a movie in that we
order the visual world by converting the random information that comes
to us into stories that explain it and endow the randomness with moral
and other kinds of meaning. For the longest time when I was young I
“ saw ” the Soviet Union through the lens of images from popular movies
that portrayed communists as dark and threatening, sinister and unkind.
It took years of reading and study and contact with actual communists
to realize that those images were not entirely accurate. And I learned
that those responsible for making them were themselves often guilty of
crimes against humanity committed to prevent what communism rep-
resented or called for – a fair and equal distribution of wealth – from
occurring. But the story that was in my mind when I was young was
the one the film media put there, and the visual images that imprinted

on my brain became a way of explaining the world I lived in. The visual