Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The study of visual communication comprises such wide-reaching and voluminous literatures as art history, the philosophy of art and →  aesthetics , →  semiotics , →  cinema studies, →  Television and mass media studies, the history and theory of →  Photography , the history and theory of →  graphic design and →  typography , the study of word–image relationships in literary, aesthetic, and rhetorical theory (→  Rhetorical Studies ), the development and use of charts, diagrams, →  cartography and questions of geographic visualization (images of place and space), the physiology and psychology of visual →  Perception , the impact of new visual technologies (including the impact of digitalization and the construction of “virtual realities”; →  Digital Imagery ), growing concerns with the concept and/or acquisition of “visual literacy,” and the boundless social and cultural issues embedded in practices of →  visual representation . Amid such an eclectic field no consensus has emerged regarding canonical texts. Even the concept of “imagery” itself seems to have no clear boundaries, encompassing concepts of the image that extend from the perceptual process, through the mental reproduction of perceptions in eidetic imagery, dreams, and memory, to the realms of abstract symbols and ideas by which we mentally map experience, and the physical creation of pictures and visual media. Consequently, ... log in or subscribe to read full text