About the Book
Visual Communication: Understanding Images in Media and Culture provides a theoretical and empirical toolkit to examine implications of mediated images. It explores a range of approaches to visual analysis, while also providing a hands-on guide to applying methods to students' own work. The book:
Illustrates a range of 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 students how to combine approaches and methods to best suit their 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.
Table 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.
Review :
This smart and engaging book introduces readers to some of the most pressing debates in visual communications studies. Effective in making often-opaque theories accessible, Aiello and Parry situate these debates in relation to a diverse toolkit of current research methods. Eighteen thickly-contextualized case studies skillfully illustrate the various steps students need to design their own projects.
Organised around the themes of identities, politics and commodification, this book offers multiple conceptual insights into how images are created, circulated, seen, sold, modified and destroyed. Its themes and arguments are grounded in a series of detailed and clearly written examples, which also explore the methodological implications of approaching images as forms of visual communication. All this adds up to a must-read for anyone interested in contemporary visual culture.
How can we understand images in media culture? Writing with clarity, insight and flair, Aiello and Parry show us that while there is no simple answer, there are many good analytical paths to pursue, demonstrating their value across no less than eighteen case studies – from political memes to photojournalism to Hollywood movie trailers and commercial imagery. Focusing on how visual communication is entangled with identities, politics and commodities, this book is not only an exemplary introduction to visual communication research: it is a significant and timely guide to the powers and properties of contemporary images.
Compelling and wide-reaching… Aiello and Parry provide us with a sense of how persuasive the visual is today and how it insinuates itself into all aspects of life, from everyday interactions to the dramas of high politics, from advertising to crisis diplomacy, and from selfies to national celebrations.
Aiello and Parry have chosen to focus on one important visual site: mediated images, according to three theoretically rich approaches: identity, politics and commodities. Each chapter is supported by their own case studies of contemporary visual phenomena, such as iconicity in the #BlackLivesMatter movement, the discursive strategies of the opening title sequence from the Netflix series Orange Is the New Black, and the design strategies that distinguish the website Vice.com… their project will be welcome not only to many classrooms but to the field at large.
Giorgia Aiello and Katy Parry present the subject of visual communication in various contexts, not avoiding difficult, ethically demanding and contemporary topics. They show the power of images in the contemporary media sphere.
...it marks the maturation of the visual research discipline. Aiello and Parry’s focused attention on the way mediated images operate culturally ensures that their project will be welcome not only to many classrooms but to the field at large.
The broad conceptual and empirical spectrum covered by Aiello and Parry is truly impressive. They provide us with a sense of how persuasive the visual is today and how it insinuates itself into all aspects of life, from everyday interactions to the dramas of high politics, from advertising to crisis diplomacy, and from selfies to national celebrations.
They consciously address diversity, inclusion, gender and stereotypes. The relevance of the book also lies in encouraging and supporting lecturers to include visual communication in their curriculum: The world, be it online or offline, is shaped by images and it is necessary that these, along with their Forms of origin and their scope for interpretation can be read and understood. Although the term "visual literacy" is not included in the index, Aiellos and Parry′s book is aimed precisely at this competence.
