Page 162 - Cultural Studies A Practical Introduction

146 Visual Culture

Alienated Homosexual? The Rowdy Frat Guy?) or “ What Alternative
Subculture Do You Belong To? ” (A Sensitive Emo Girl? A Nerdy Indie
Guy? A Streetwise Rapper? A Spacey Hippie?). For every identity, there is
an accompanying set of aesthetic, behavioral, and attitudinal expec tations
that people have internalized through the repetition of their representa-

tions in visual culture. It is futile to ask which came first, the social category
in reality, or the representation of the social category in visual culture, just
as it useless to ask whether your appearance in front of the mirror precedes

your reflection on its surface. These relationships are codependent, and
integrally connected to one another; in other words, changes in social
reality engender changes in media representation, and vice versa. However,
this isn ’ t to suggest that we are irrevocably trapped in a world of mediated
manipulation. Groups who wish to challenge the way they are perceived
in reality may begin by calling attention to ways in which they are unfairly
represented in the narratives and images that comprise visual culture.
Visual culture is not only an index of who we are as people. It is also a
tangible artistic object, a crafted thing with shape and contour. It always
has a spatial and a temporal dimension. The spatial dimension is fabricated
through the use of photographic or cinematic techniques such as the place-
ment of a camera or the use of light and set. The temporal dimension is
constructed through the assembling of shots or takes into a coherent
narrative. Narrative is different from story , which is the actual events
fi lmed. Narrative names the string of images that tell that story.
There are other important dimensions of visual culture that enter into
storytelling such as characterization and meaning. When a young doctor
is asked by a dying girl a third his age to give her one kiss before she dies
and does so, the meaning conveyed and depicted is “ kindness ” rather than
something more lurid. Switch the genre or kind of television show it is,
and that action might change meaning considerably. Meaning in visual
narratives is dependent on context or surroundings, and context can be
anything from the genre or kind of visual narrative to the place in the story
in which the action occurs. Some things can have multiple meanings, even
a kiss, which can be simultaneously an expression of affection and an act
of betrayal.
One of the more interesting features of visual culture to examine is the
way the same thing is represented differently in different visual situations.
Since feminism disturbed the settled order of gender roles beginning in the

1960s, images of women in film especially have given expression to con-
tending attitudes about women ’ s new found independence and power.