Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

This is a wide-ranging and stimulating introduction to the history and theory of visual culture from painting to the computer and television screen. It will prove indispensable to students of art and art history as well as students of cultural studies.
Mirzoeff begins by defining what visual culture is, and explores how and why visual media - fine art, cinema, the Internet, advertising, performance, photography, television - have become so central to contemporary everyday life. He argues that the visual is replacing the linguistic as our primary means of communicating with each other and of understanding our postmodern world.
Part One of the Introduction presents a history of modern ways of seeing, including:
* the formal practices of line and colour in painting
* photographys claim to represent reality
* virtual reality, from the nineteenth century to the present.
In Part Two, Mirzoeff examines:
* the visualization of race, sexuality and human identity in culture
* gender and sexuality and questions of the gaze in visual culture
* representations of encounters with the other, from colonial narratives to Science Fiction texts such as The Thing, Independence Day, Star Trek and The X-Files
* the death of Princess Diana and the popular mourning which followed as marking the coming of age of a global visualized culture.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• List of illustrations (p. ix)
• Acknowledgments (p. xiii)
• Introduction: What is visual culture? (p. 1)
• Visualizing (p. 5)
• Visual Power, Visual Pleasure (p. 9)
• Visuality (p. 13)
• Culture (p. 22)
• Everyday Life (p. 26)
• Part 1 Visuality (p. 35)
• 1 Picture definition: Line, color, vision (p. 37)
• Perspectives (p. 38)
• Discipline and Color (p. 51)
• Normalizing Color: Color Blindness (p. 53)
• Light Over Color (p. 55)
• White (p. 58)
• Coda (p. 62)
• 2 The age of photography (1839-1982) (p. 65)
• The Death of Painting (p. 65)
• The Birth of the Democratic Image (p. 71)
• Death and Photography (p. 73)
• From Photo Noir to Post-Photography (p. 78)
• The Death of Photography (p. 88)
• 3 Virtuality: From virtual antiquity to the pixel zone (p. 91)
• Interfaces with Virtuality (p. 92)
• Virtuality Goes Global (p. 96)
• Telesublime (p. 99)
• Virtual Reality (p. 101)
• Virtual Reality and Everyday Life (p. 104)
• Virtual Identity (p. 107)
• Net Life (p. 111)
• More Pixels Anyone? (p. 114)
• Virtual Bodies (p. 116)
• Part 2 Culture (p. 127)
• 4 Transculture: From Kongo to the Congo (p. 129)
• Inventing the Heart of Darkness (p. 132)
• Resistance Through Ritual (p. 147)
• Cultural Memory (p. 153)
• New Visions from the Congo (p. 156)
• 5 Seeing sex (p. 162)
• Fetishizing the Gaze (p. 163)
• From Inversion to Opposites and Ambiguity (p. 167)
• Seeing Female Sex (p. 170)
• Mixing: the Cultural Politics of Race and Reproduction (p. 174)
• Queering the Gaze: Roger Casement's Eyes (p. 183)
• 6 First contact: From Independence Day to 1492 and Millennium (p. 193)
• Enter the Extraterrestials (p. 194)
• The Return of the Empire (p. 202)
• Aliens as Evil (p. 207)
• Trekking (p. 211)
• TV Past and Present (p. 222)
• Part 3 Global/Local (p. 229)
• 7 Diana's death: Gender, photography and the inauguration of global visual culture (p. 231)
• Popularity and Cultural Studies (p. 232)
• Photography and the Princess (p. 235)
• Pictures in India (p. 237)
• The Celebrity Punctum (p. 240)
• Flags and Protocol: the Devil in the Detail (p. 244)
• Death and the Maiden: the Sign of New Britain (p. 247)
• Pixel Planet (p. 248)
• Coda:Fire (p. 255)
• Index (p. 261)