Joan Saab
Aubrey Anable
Catherine Zuromskis
This edition first published 2021
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data Names: Saab, A. Joan, editor. | Anable, Aubrey, editor. | Zuromskis, Catherine, 1971– editor. Title: A concise companion to visual culture / edited by A. Joan Saab, Aubrey Anable, Catherine Zuromskis. Description: First edition. | Hoboken : Wiley‐Blackwell, [2021] | Series: Wiley Blackwell companions to cultural studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020024720 (print) | LCCN 2020024721 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119415404 (hardback) | ISBN 9781119415442 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781119415473 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Art and society. | Culture. | Visual perception. | Visual communication. | Popular culture. | Communication and culture. Classification: LCC N72.S6 C59235 2020 (print) | LCC N72.S6 (ebook) | DDC 701/.03–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020024720 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020024721
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Cover Image: Courtesy of Meggan Gould
For Douglas
Acknowledgments
This book would not be possible without the support, encouragements, cooperation, and patience of our colleagues, collaborators, friends, and family members. We wish to thank our many brilliant contributors, who confirmed our suspicions that visual studies is alive and well and as relevant as ever. For the beautiful image on the cover of this book, we thank Meggan Gould, whose work offers the perfect distillation of how historical, material, playful, and alluring technologies of vision can be. Janey Fisher made our index. Juliet Booker, Sophie Bradwell, Emily Corkhill, Catriona King, Jake Opie, Sarah Peters, Richard Samson, and Manuela Tecusan at Wiley Blackwell provided guidance over the long process of bringing this volume together.
We thank our institutions—the University of Rochester, Carleton University, and the Rochester Institute of Technology—for their ongoing support. Martin Collier and Lorna Maier in the Art and Art History Department at the University of Rochester helped facilitate our writing retreat in the summer of 2019, and funds from the Dean’s Office helped offset the cost of the index. And Cat’s colleagues in the School for Photographic Arts and Sciences at the Rochester Institute of Technology (most especially Therese Mulligan) made it possible for her to start a new book project and a new job at the same time and still feel on top of things.
Most of all, we want to thank our loved ones. Joan would like to thank Steve, Finn, and Wilson Brauer for their love and support—and for being mostly quiet when she was skyping with her co‐editors. Aubrey thanks Marc Furstenau for his sage editing advice, companionship, and humor during the process of pulling this book together. Cat is inspired every day by her two favorite people in the world: Daniel Worden and sweet Clementine.
Notes on Contributors
Kate Palmer Albers is associate professor of art history at Whittier College in Los Angeles. Her research interests include the role of ephemerality in photographic experience; narrative, biography, and archive in relation to visual art; mapping and landscape; and emerging technologies of computer vision and machine learning. Albers is the author of Uncertain Histories: Accumulation, Inaccessibility, and Doubt in Contemporary Photography (2015) and co‐editor, with Jordan Bear, of The Night Albums: Visibility and the Ephemeral Photograph (forthcoming, 2021).
Aubrey Anable is associate professor of film studies in the School for Studies in Art and Culture at Carleton University in Ottawa. She is the author of Playing with Feelings: Video Games and Affect, published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2018. Her research on digital media history and aesthetics, video games, and theories of affect has appeared in the journals Feminist Media Histories, Afterimage, Television & New Media, Ada, and various edited collections.
Ross Barrett is associate professor of art history at Boston University. He is the author of Rendering Violence: Riots, Strikes, and Upheaval in Nineteenth‐Century American Art (2014), and co‐editor, with Daniel Worden, of Oil Culture (2014). His current book project examines five American artists who painted and speculated on real estate during the nineteenth century.
Jane Blocker is professor of art history at the University of Minnesota. Her most recent book is Becoming Past: History in Contemporary Art (2015). She has published articles in Performance Research, Grey Room, Art Journal, Camera Obscura, Cultural Studies, Visual Resources, and Performing Arts Journal and contributed essays to anthologies including Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History; The Aesthetics of Risk; After Criticism: New Responses to Art and Performance; and The Ends of Performance.
Eugenie Brinkema is associate professor of contemporary literature and media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.