Currently a Professor of Visual Culture at Manchester Metropolitan University my research engages with the relationships between history, memory and visual culture, especially in the field of propaganda and publicity in the graphic arts. To misquote WJT Mitchell this has led to an abiding question 'What do pictures do?I have published and curated exhibitions in the field since 1989. I was Director of the ARHC Resource Enhancement project Posters of Conflict: the visual culture of public information and counter information with the Imperial War Museum from 2003-06. Other previous research projects on the Vietnam War, The Falklands Conflict, the 'change' in Central Europe in 1989, and communist rule in central and eastern Europe were collaborations with museums and art galleries which resulted in exhibitions and publications. In 2005 I researched and curated 'Forced Laughter' a celebration of the Soviet cartoonist, Boris Efimov,105th birthday in Prague. In 2008 I co-curated the major exhibition of war posters, Weapons of Mass Communication, at the Imperial War Museum, London. Since 2008 I have published on the First World War poster in Britain and Europe
Through the concept of a visual apparatus, the attempt is to shed new light and thinking on pictu... more Through the concept of a visual apparatus, the attempt is to shed new light and thinking on pictures as material objects; how they act and feed into our subjectivities, experiences and realities and to account for their currency, duration, affectivity and authority beyond transparent representation or symbolic meaning. In order to achieve this, Barad's agential realism is inflected by insights from Malafouris's (2013) material engagement theory; W.J.T. Mitchell's (2005) image theory; Jens Eder and Charlotte Klonk's (2017) image operations; Mondzian's (2005) understanding of the economy of the image, as well as the ontological concerns of new German art history and image science exemplified in the work of Hans Belting (1996, 2011) and Horst Bredekamp (2017), for example. In this framework, the worlds pictures create, and the subjectivities they produce, are not understood to precede the phenomena they depict. The picture, as the outcome of the apparatus which produces it, makes an 'observational cut' that simultaneously excludes and includes certain elements from its frame. As such, it has to be comprehended as party to processes which are both ethical and political. A fact which is particularly important during times of conflict and war.
Through the concept of a visual apparatus, the attempt is to shed new light and thinking on pictu... more Through the concept of a visual apparatus, the attempt is to shed new light and thinking on pictures as material objects; how they act and feed into our subjectivities, experiences and realities and to account for their currency, duration, affectivity and authority beyond transparent representation or symbolic meaning. In order to achieve this, Barad's agential realism is inflected by insights from Malafouris's (2013) material engagement theory; W.J.T. Mitchell's (2005) image theory; Jens Eder and Charlotte Klonk's (2017) image operations; Mondzian's (2005) understanding of the economy of the image, as well as the ontological concerns of new German art history and image science exemplified in the work of Hans Belting (1996, 2011) and Horst Bredekamp (2017), for example. In this framework, the worlds pictures create, and the subjectivities they produce, are not understood to precede the phenomena they depict. The picture, as the outcome of the apparatus which produces it, makes an 'observational cut' that simultaneously excludes and includes certain elements from its frame. As such, it has to be comprehended as party to processes which are both ethical and political. A fact which is particularly important during times of conflict and war.
Uploads