Visual Communication and Culture: Images in Action

A reader for undergraduate students enrolled in second- or third-year visual culture or visual communications courses offered via communication studies and cultural studies departments in universities and colleges nation-wide.

Visual Communication and Culture: Images in Action uses a unique case-study approach to encourage students to critically examine the production and interpretation of images in their personal lives and across a variety of disciplines. Including eighteen selections from existing Canadian, UK, and US works across various disciplines, as well as an additional seven articles written specifically for this text, the twenty-four articles in this collection each emphasize that images are cultural productions. In addition, this volume includes nine easy-to-understand introductions to assist students in becoming visually literate consumers of images, with an understanding of how culture influences practices of visual communication and vice versa.

Jonathan Finn is an associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University and a member of the editorial board of Wilfrid Laurier University Press. He is the author of Capturing the Criminal Image: From Mug Shot to Surveillance Society (Minnesota, 2009), as well as numerous essays on surveillance, visual communication, and visual culture. His primary area of research is the history and theory of photography, with specific interest in institutional uses of the medium. He is currently developing a new research project on visual communication technologies and sport.