Visual Culture Reader Primer

This book is a series of 200-word—on average—synopses of the 47 fascinating and valuable essays contained in “The Visual Culture Reader—Third Edition,” published by Routledge in 2012, edited by Prof. Nicholas Mirzoeff. These synopses were originally written as an aid for students on the Master’s Degree in Photography at Kingston University in Surrey, as they studied and researched for the Module FA7103. The approach I have taken in preparing these synopses is to use plain jargon-free language. That is often not the case with the actual essays, which are sometimes written in a jargon-heavy tone with several of them shading into either pretentious or impenetrable (Massumi comes to mind). My aim was to be “neutral” whatever that means—for as we know, or are soon to find out, this is a rather contested state. But, on the other hand, I make no claim to being a machine—some of my favorite papers here are Ross, Paglen, Mavor, Blier and Enwezor. And my least favorite? ... it’s got to be Massumi. If you are a student studying The Visual Culture Reader, you can use this primer as a basic orientation before launching into some challenging-but-rewarding reading.