Visual Communication: Understanding Images in Media Culture

Visual Communication: Understanding Images in Media and Culture provides a theoretical and empirical toolkit to examine implications of mediated images. It explores a range of approaches to visual analysis, while also providing a hands-on guide to applying methods to students′ own work. The book:

• Illustrates a range of perspectives, from content analysis and semiotics, to multimodal and critical discourse analysis
• Explores the centrality of images to issues of identity and representation, politics and activism, and commodities and consumption
• Brings theory to life with a host of original case studies, from celebrity videos on Youtube and civil unrest on Twitter, to the lifestyle branding of Vice Media and Getty Images
• Shows students how to combine approaches and methods to best suit their own research questions and projects 

An invaluable guide to analysing contemporary media images, this is essential reading for students and researchers of visual communication and visual culture. 

Giorgia Aiello is an Associate Professor in Media and Communication at the University of Leeds. Her research focuses on the politics and potentials of visual, multimodal, and material communication. Giorgia is interested in how aesthetics shape and are shaped by political, economic, and cultural agendas. Her work aims to uncover how identities are formed, how both difference and diversity are negotiated, and how inequalities are maintained or overcome through media and communication. She is a co-editor of Communicating the City: Meanings, Practices and Interactions (Peter Lang, 2017) and the author of many journal articles, book chapters, and short publications about branding, photography, data visualization, political imagery, and cities.

Katy Parry is an Associate Professor in Media and Communication at the University of Leeds. Her work focuses on visual politics and activism, images of war and representations of contemporary soldiering. She is a co-author of Political Culture and Media Genre: Beyond the News (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) with Kay Richardson and John Corner, and a co-editor of Can the Media Serve Democracy? Essays in Honour of Jay G. Blumler (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), with Stephen Coleman and Giles Moss. Her current research interests include the visual expressions of political solidarity shared in response to the murder of Jo Cox MP during the Brexit referendum campaign, and the representational politics of the war veteran in contemporary media.