Read more
In today s digital media environment we are creating and consuming more images than ever before. From the importance of image in politics, to the ubiquity of the selfie across social media platforms, visual communication is increasingly central to our everyday mediated lives.
It is more important than ever to examine the social and cultural implications of mediated images but how can we really interrogate the work that images do?
Visual Communication: Understanding Images in Media Culture provides a theoretical and empirical toolkit to do just that. It explores a range of approaches to visual analysis, while also providing a hands-on guide to applying a diverse range of methods to your own work. The book:
- Illustrates multiple perspectives, from content analysis and semiotics, to multimodal and critical discourse analysis.
- Explores the centrality of images to issues of identity and representation, politics and activism, and commodities and consumption.
- Brings theory to life with a host of original case studies, from celebrity videos on YouTube and civil unrest on Twitter, to the lifestyle branding of Vice Media and Getty Images.
- Shows you how to combine approaches and methods to best suit your own research questions and projects.
An invaluable guide to analysing contemporary media images, this is essential reading for students and researchers of visual communication and visual culture.
List of contents
Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: Understanding images in media culture: methodological considerations
Chapter 3: Envisioning the self in digital media
Chapter 4: Communicating visions of collective identity
Chapter 5: Ways of seeing difference beyond stereotypes
Chapter 6: Images of politicians in the public sphere
Chapter 7: The visual spectacles of protest and activism
Chapter 8: Picturing international conflict and war
Chapter 9: The visual attractions of advertising and promotional culture
Chapter 10: Visualizing lifestyles as commodities
Chapter 11: Brands as visual experiences
Chapter 12: Conclusion
About the author
Giorgia Aiello is an Associate Professor in Media and Communication at the University of Leeds. Her research focuses on the politics and potentials of visual, multimodal, and material communication. Giorgia is interested in how aesthetics shape and are shaped by political, economic, and cultural agendas. Her work aims to uncover how identities are formed, how both difference and diversity are negotiated, and how inequalities are maintained or overcome through media and communication. She is a co-editor of Communicating the City: Meanings, Practices and Interactions (Peter Lang, 2017) and the author of many journal articles, book chapters, and short publications about branding, photography, data visualization, political imagery, and cities.
Katy Parry is an Associate Professor in Media and Communication at the University of Leeds. Her work focuses on visual politics and activism, images of war and representations of contemporary soldiering. She is a co-author of Political Culture and Media Genre: Beyond the News (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) with Kay Richardson and John Corner, and a co-editor of Can the Media Serve Democracy? Essays in Honour of Jay G. Blumler (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), with Stephen Coleman and Giles Moss. Her current research interests include the visual expressions of political solidarity shared in response to the murder of Jo Cox MP during the Brexit referendum campaign, and the representational politics of the war veteran in contemporary media.
Summary
A theoretical and empirical toolkit for analysing and understanding media and mediated images - from branding and PR, to tweets and selfies. It explores a range of approaches to visual analysis, while also providing a hands-on guide to applying methods to your own work.
