The nineteenth century is central to contemporary discussions of visual culture. This reader brings together for the first time key writings about the period, exploring such topics as photographs, exhibitions and advertising. Suggesting that "modernity" rather than "modernism" is a valuable way of understanding the changes particular to the visual culture of the time, the editors investigate the variety of nineteenth-century images, technologies and visual experiences, stressing in particular the very consciousness of vision and visuality.
The reader begins with three specially written essays about definitions of visual culture as an object of study. "Genealogies" introduces key writings about culture from writers living in the nineteenth century itself or from those who scrutinized its visual culture from early in the twentieth century such as Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer. The remainder is organized around themes: technologies of vision, practices of display and the circulation of images, cities and the built environment, visual representations of the past, visual representations of categories of racial, sexual and social differences, and spatial configurations of inside and out, private and public. Selections include well-known authors and new research by younger scholars to produce a well-balanced and comprehensive collection.

A stunning look at the profound impact of the jet plane on the mid-century aesthetic, from Disneyland to Life magazine Vanessa R. Schwartz engagingly presents the jet plane's power to define a new age at a critical moment in the mid-20th century, arguing that the craft's speed and smooth ride allowed people to imagine themselves living in the future. Exploring realms as diverse as airport architecture, theme park design, film, and photography, Schwartz argues that the jet created an aesthetic that circulated on the ground below. Visual and media culture, including Eero Saarinen's airports, David Bailey's photographs of the jet set, and Ernst Haas's experiments in color photojournalism glamorized the imagery of motion. Drawing on unprecedented access to the archives of The Walt Disney Studios, Schwartz also examines the period's most successful example of fluid motion meeting media culture: Disneyland. The park's dedication to "people-moving" defined Walt Disney's vision, shaping the very identity of the place. The jet age aesthetic laid the groundwork for our contemporary media culture, in which motion is so fluid that we can surf the internet while going nowhere at all.

The recent history of cultural exchange between France and the United States would appear to be defined by "freedom fries" and boycotts against Beaujolais--or, on the other side of the Atlantic, by enraged farmers toppling statues of Ronald McDonald. But this dismal state of affairs is a long way from the mutual admiration that followed World War II, epitomized in a 1958 cover of "Look" magazine that declared "Brigitte Bardot conquers America." "It's So French!" explores the close affinity between the French and American film industries that flourished in the postwar years, breaking down myths of American imperialism and French cultural protectionism while illuminating the vital role that cinema has played in the globalization of culture.
Hollywood was once enamored with everything French and this infatuation blossomed in a wildly popular series of films including "An American in Paris,"" Gigi,"" "and "Funny Face," Schwartz here examines the visual appeal of such films, and then broadens her analysis to explore their production and distribution, probing the profitable influences that Hollywood and Paris exerted on each other. This exchange moved beyond individual films with the sensational spectacle of the Cannes Film Festival and the meteoric career of Brigitte Bardot. And in turn, their success led to a new kind of film that celebrated internationalism and cultural hybridity. Ultimately, Schwartz uncovers an intriguing paradox: that the road to globalization was paved with nationalist cliches, and thus, films beloved for being so French were in fact the first signs of a nascent cosmopolitan culture.
Packed with an array of colorful film stills, publicity photographs, paparazzi shots, ads, and never before seen archival images, "It's So French!" is an incisive account of the fertile collaboration between France and the United States that expanded the geographic horizons of both filmmaking and filmgoing, forever changing what the world saw and dreamed of when they went to the movies.

The nineteenth century is central to contemporary discussions of visual culture. This reader brings together for the first time key writings about the period, exploring such topics as photographs, exhibitions and advertising. Suggesting that "modernity" rather than "modernism" is a valuable way of understanding the changes particular to the visual culture of the time, the editors investigate the variety of nineteenth-century images, technologies and visual experiences, stressing in particular the very consciousness of vision and visuality.
The reader begins with three specially written essays about definitions of visual culture as an object of study. "Genealogies" introduces key writings about culture from writers living in the nineteenth century itself or from those who scrutinized its visual culture from early in the twentieth century such as Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer. The remainder is organized around themes: technologies of vision, practices of display and the circulation of images, cities and the built environment, visual representations of the past, visual representations of categories of racial, sexual and social differences, and spatial configurations of inside and out, private and public. Selections include well-known authors and new research by younger scholars to produce a well-balanced and comprehensive collection.

During the second half of the nineteenth century, Paris emerged as the entertainment capital of the world. The sparkling redesigned city fostered a culture of energetic crowd-pleasing and multi-sensory amusements that would apprehend and represent real life as spectacle. Vanessa R. Schwartz examines the explosive popularity of such phenomena as the boulevards, the mass press, public displays of corpses at the morgue, wax museums, panoramas, and early film. Drawing on a wide range of written and visual materials, including private and business archives, and working at the intersections of art history, literature, and cinema studies, Schwartz argues that "spectacular realities" are part of the foundation of modern mass society. She refutes the notion that modern life produced an unending parade of distractions leading to alienation, and instead suggests that crowds gathered not as dislocated spectators but as members of a new kind of crowd, one united in pleasure rather than protest.

Casting aside the traditional conception of film as an outgrowth of photography, theater, and the novel, the essays in this volume reassess the relationship between the emergence of film and the broader culture of modernity. Contributors, leading scholars in film and cultural studies, link the popularity of cinema in the late nineteenth century to emerging cultural phenomena such as window shopping, mail-order catalogs, and wax museums.

The current decline of print journalism, the rise of the Internet and the advent of digital photography provides the perfect point in time from which to reflect on the ubiquity of the news picture. Powerful and controversial, news pictures promise to make the world at once immediate and knowable. Yet while many great writers and thinkers have evaluated photographs of atrocity and crisis, few have sought to set these in a broader context by defining the news picture itself in all its forms.For the first time, this volume defines what counts as a news picture, how pictures are selected and distributed, where they are seen and how we critique and value them. Presenting the best thinking on this fascinating topic, this book considers the news picture through history, from its early form in the eighteenth-century broadside, through the press heyday in daily and weekly newspapers, to the rise of broadcast news and the current day. It examines the news picture in all its forms, depicting sport, fashion, society, celebrity, war, catastrophe and exoticism; and many mediums, including photography, painting, wood engraving, film, video and YouTube-based smart phone journalism. Packed with the best research and full colour-illustrations throughout, this book will appeal to students and readers interested in our rich visual culture.