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Journal of Visual Culture

Journal Description

Journal of Visual Culture 

Journal of Visual Culture is an international refereed journal that welcomes compelling, critically engaged contributions that explore and expand trans-disciplinary global visual cultures.

“The Journal of Visual Culture is indispensable.” Professor Christine Ross, Department of Art History and Communication Studies, McGill University

“There is an unmistakable seriousness as well as a handsome hospitality in the range of method, topic and topography on show.” Times Higher Education Supplement

“The Journal of Visual Culture continues to be a critical resource for scholars looking for intelligent analyses of the visual arts, popular culture, media, curatorial practice and digital platforms.” Professor Jennifer A Gonzalez, University of California, Santa Cruz

“The Journal of Visual Culture is the place to look for cutting-edge research on the theory, practice, and circulation of visual culture today.” Dr Nicole Starosielski, Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University

“The Journal of Visual Culture is a generous and inventive site of intellectual possibility where authors and guest editors can reconfigure how the visual and cultural come together, allowing for intellectual challenges to be made – critically and imaginatively – to current disciplinary protocols.” Professor Jane Rendell, The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL

Recent themed issues include:

Armed/Unarmed: Guns in American Visual and Material Culture (2018), guest edited by Faye Gleisser and Delia Solomons, with contributors including Patrice D. Douglass, Michelle Millar Fisher, Colette Galter, Brian Hatton, Lindsay Livingston, and a roundtable with Attequa Ali, Jonathan Ferrara, Kathy O’Dell, and Susanne Slavick.

Affect at the Limits of Photography (2018), guest edited by Lisa Cartwright and Elizabeth Wolfson, with contributors including Ariella Azoulay, Lisa E. Bloom, Matthew Brower, Thy Phu and Elspeth H Brown, Kelli Moore, and Shaw Michelle Smith.

50 Years of Art and Objecthood: Traces, Impact, Critique (2017), edited by Alison Green and Joanne Morra, with contributors Alison Green, Stephen Melville, Joanne Morra, Daniel Rubinstein, Margarita Tupitsyn, Victor Tupitsyn, Phoebe von Held, Duncan White.

Architecture! (2016), edited by Jae Emerling and Ronna Gardner, with contributors Eric Aliez, Alfredo Brillembourg, Sarah Deyong, Alexi Kalagas, Hubert Klumpner, Robin Mackay, Lina Malfona, Gioancarlo Mazzanti, Robert McCarter, Donald Preziosi, Jane Rendell, Martino Stierli, Michael Waldrep.

Visual Activism (2016), edited by Julia Bryan-Wilson, Jennifer González and Dominic Willsdon, with contributors Ariella Azoulay, Macarena Gómez-Barris, Deena Chalabi, Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0, Miguel A López, Amin Husain, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Nitasha Dhillon, A Joan Saab, Tina Takemoto, Avram Finkelstein, Aaron Gach, Cheyanne Epps, Kyle Lane-McKinley, Elisa Adami, TJ Demos, Amy Lyford, Carlos Motta, Trinh T Minh-ha, Srinivas Aditya Mopidevi, Jerome Reyes, Nine Yamamoto-Masson, Teddy Cruz, Favianna Rodriguez, Zanele Muholi, Selaelo Mannya, Valerie Thomas, Shannon Jackson.

Recent and forthcoming contributions to Journal of Visual Culture include:

  • Jill Casid (UWM) on being undone
  • Georges Didi-Huberman (Paris) on the album of images
  • Tom Holert (Berlin) on immersion
  • Tung-Hui Hu (Michigan) on reticence
  • Esther Leslie (Birkbeck) on atmosphere
  • Rahul Mukherjee (UPenn) on ecologies of ruination
  • MIT’s Lisa Parks (interview by Asbjørn Grønstad and Øyvind Vågnes) on global media technologies
  • Nicole Starosielski (NYU) on thermal vision
  • Magda Szczesniak and Lukasz Zaremba (Warsaw) on paranoid looking
  • Linda Williams (Berkley) on lust, motion and e-motion
  • Beirut-based artist Akram Zaatari (interviewed by Elisa Adami) on history, photography, and the archive


Forthcoming themed issues for 2020 and beyond include:

Robot Vision, guest edited by Luci Eldridge (Winchester School of Art) and Nina Trivedi (Royal College of Art), with contributors including Jeremiah Ambrose, Brian Black, Stephen Ellis, Nea Ehrlich, Joey Holder, Gregory Minissale, Maya Oppenheimer, Nicola Plant, and Bianca Westermann.

Trans, Art, and Visual Culture, guest edited by Cyle Metzger (Stanford) and Kirstin Ringelberg (Elon University), with contributors including KJ Cerankowski, Kara Carmack, Sascha Crasnow, Sebastian De Line, Robb Hernandez, Heather Holmes, Ace Lehner, KJ Rawson and Nikki Tantum, Cole Rizki, Gregory Stamatina, Chris Straayer, Susan Stryker, Elisa Steinbock, and Frial Zachary.

VR: Immersion and Empathy, guest edited by Brooke Belisle (Stony Brook University) and Paul Roquet (MIT).

Journal Feed

  • At the crossroads: photography, ecology and heritage in Istanbul
    by Berin Golonu
    Journal of Visual Culture, Ahead of Print. This article looks at three contemporary photo-based projects that reference Istanbul’s visual histories and document its endangered ecologies. These works take a critical approach to cultural heritage practices in contrast to official discourses that serve state power or justify capital accumulation. Osman Bozkurt’s Scenes, Ali Taptık’s Topographic Nostalgia, and Cemre Yeşil and Maria Sturm’s For Birds’ Sake focus on the relationships between the human and non-human elements of urban geographies. Their projects conceive of heritage as a practice that combines ecological concerns with preserving the cultural remnants of the urban past. Whether critiquing […]
  • Water and fluidity in İz Öztat’s heterochronic imaginaries in the aftermath of genocide
    by Lara Fresko Madra
    Journal of Visual Culture, Ahead of Print. Between the years 2013–2016, the artist İz Öztat created four distinct bodies of work, all of which engaged aspects of water. This period was marked in Turkey by the heightened tensions around the neoliberal (re)distribution of public space and public resources, which escalated in the aftermath of the Gezi Park Protests of 2013. In this article, the author argues that, beyond its immediate critique of contemporary capitalist appropriation, Öztat’s engagement with water builds relations across time, space, and species to recall histories of the Armenian Genocide, challenging the denials of official historiography. By […]
  • Revolutionary Enclosures (Until the Apricots)
    by Jasbir K. Puar
    Journal of Visual Culture, Ahead of Print. Jasbir K. Puar and Dima Srouji build upon their respective work in architecture, visual art and decolonial theory to produce a collaborative examination of colonial pathologies for Sharjah Art Biennial 15, 2023. Srouji’s architecture and art practice encompass a variety of mediums that allow her to explore notions of heritage and public space in Palestine and the region. Puar is a writer and scholar whose current work focuses on settler colonial violence, disability and debility in Palestine. Their collaborative installations integrate understandings of space and planning with the contemporary politics of resistance in […]
  • Gaza in plain sight: witnessing in solidarity
    by Mazen Kerbaj
    Journal of Visual Culture, Ahead of Print. In this visual essay, Mazen Kerbaj and Jana Traboulsi bear witness to the genocidal violence that has been unfolding in Gaza since 7 October 2023. From Berlin and Lebanon, respectively, Kerbaj and Traboulsi have been chronicling and responding to the harrowing day-to-day news and testimonies from Gaza. Their drawings raise fundamental questions about what it is to bear witness to genocide as it unfolds, about the politics of seeing as an act of solidarity against imposed invisibility and about racialized sight – the eye that refuses to see what is hiding in plain […]
  • Tarot as affective cartography in the uneven Anthropocene
    by Anastasia Murney
    Journal of Visual Culture, Volume 22, Issue 2, Page 243-263, August 2023. In the context of anthropogenic climate change, this article critiques the prevalence of ocularcentric strategies, such as spectacular large-scale artworks and data visualizations, questioning the epistemological assumptions underpinning them. The author proposes Tarot, a dialogical practice unfolding through a deck of cards, often used for divination or occult purposes, as a valuable method for addressing the cognitive and affective messiness of climate crisis. This article examines three socially engaged art practices centring Tarot – James Leonard’s The Tent of Casually Observed Phenologies (2017–), Adelita Husni-Bey’s The Reading/La Seduta […]
  • Pictograms for resistance: historicity and militant design research in Amazonian Ecuador
    by Nathaly Pinto
    Journal of Visual Culture, Volume 22, Issue 2, Page 176-201, August 2023. This article focuses on the experiences of developing and using pictograms as visual devices to support Indigenous communities of Amazonian Ecuador. It recognizes the imbalances and contradictions amidst the complex histories and identities of a Latin American state such as Ecuador. The authors emphasize the need to decolonize the design activist imagination and highlight two key issues. The first is in appreciating how historicity operates in this context. The authors show how a non-teleological, historical consciousness is central to processes of deliberation and collaboration. Secondly, they introduce the […]
  • Modeling doubt: a speculative syllabus
    by Shannon Mattern
    Journal of Visual Culture, Volume 22, Issue 2, Page 125-145, August 2023. In light of increasing artificial intelligence and proliferating conspiracy, technofetishism and moral panics, faith in ubiquitous data capture and mistrust of public institutions, the ascendance of STEM and the ‘deplatforming’ of the arts and humanities, this article considers doubt as an epistemological condition, a political tool, an ethical force, a rhetorical register, and an aesthetic category. Adapted from the author’s May 2023 inaugural King’s Public Lecture in Digital Humanities at King’s College London, and structured in the form of a syllabus for a speculative class, it aims to […]
  • Paul Roquet, The Immersive Enclosure: Virtual Reality in Japan
    by Cecilia Chen
    Journal of Visual Culture, Volume 22, Issue 2, Page 271-274, August 2023.
  • Burcu Dogramaci and Kerstin Pinther (eds) Design Dispersed: Forms of Migration and Flight
    by Esra Bici Nasır
    Journal of Visual Culture, Volume 22, Issue 2, Page 268-270, August 2023.
  • Kirsty Sinclair Dootson, The Rainbow’s Gravity: Colour, Materiality and British Modernity
    by Siobhan Angus
    Journal of Visual Culture, Volume 22, Issue 2, Page 264-267, August 2023.
  • Hentyle Yapp, Minor China: Method, Materialism, and the Aesthetic
    by Yahia Zhengtang Ma
    Journal of Visual Culture, Volume 22, Issue 2, Page 275-278, August 2023.
  • From sublime awe to abject cringe: on the embodied processing of AI art
    by Shane Denson
    Journal of Visual Culture, Volume 22, Issue 2, Page 146-175, August 2023. This article urges a reorientation in thinking about AI art (and AI more generally), shifting from the common focus on computational ‘intelligence’ to the embodied, metabolic processing that takes place in our encounters with (moving-image) artworks produced with machine-learning algorithms. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s corporeal phenomenology, the article argues that spectators’ bodies act as filters, distilling visual phenomena from a range of extraperceptual facets of these works; in particular, bodies react to invisible algorithmic infrastructures, which, in the case of machine learning algorithms, also operate as filters in their […]
  • Window on the nostalgia box: television and the ambient aesthetics of karaoke in 1980s Japan
    by Chelsea Morgen Ward
    Journal of Visual Culture, Volume 22, Issue 2, Page 222-242, August 2023. This article traces the social, technological and legal factors that, from the 1960s onward, transformed karaoke into a televisual medium. The author shows how the incorporation of the television screen into karaoke performance reveals a cross-section of postwar Japanese anxieties surrounding gendered leisure practices, licensing and storage of emerging media formats, and the regulation of the body within urban space. She further argues that the resultant ambient aesthetics of karaoke background videos encode a particular historical moment in the 1980s, in which karaoke emerged as a leisure activity […]
  • Earth as image and operation
    by Asia Bazdyrieva
    Journal of Visual Culture, Volume 22, Issue 2, Page 202-221, August 2023. In this interview, scholar–curator Bryan Norton discusses new forms of planetary-scale image-making with artist–researcher Asia Bazydrieva (Geocinema) and media theorist Jussi Parikka. While collaborating with Bazdyrieva during the production of Geocinema’s ‘Making of Earths’, a documentary exploring the Digital Belt and Road Initiative in China, Parikka wrote a new book, Operational Images: From the Visual to the Invisual (2023). In this study, Parikka suggests that the forms of image-making explored in ‘Making of Earths’ press against the very borders of the visible, possessing a long history with drastic […]