Short Essay title: To what extent has the study of visual culture enriched our understanding of ‘imperial history’?
As I’ve previously mentioned on these blogs, whilst I have never been particularly artistic, ‘art’ or ‘visual culture’ have always fascinated me as a window to how a certain time or place would have looked or felt like. In spite of this I have always been more comfortable with words. When presented with the option between ‘a project’ and an essay, I will hands down pick the essay every time. Furthermore – somewhat hypocritically – in the hierarchy of primary source material in my head, I would always place a textual source ‘above’ a visual source. Up until now, visual sources have only ever served to illustrate to me as evidence, a point raised by a textual source. So, before undertaking this Short Essay assignment, I found myself in this curious position where I was about to examine mostly visual sources for my Miss World project and yet still regarded them as accessories to textual sources.
And apparently I’m not alone. Edward Said, who has done so much to inspire the analysis of visual regimes as part of the postcolonial project, once said he found himself “somewhat tongue-tied” when he had to talk about the realm of the visual.[1] Even looking back at my St Andrew’s historical career, I struggled to remember the few times when we were asked to analyse visual materials as primary sources. Why was this the case? If indeed the study of history is meant to help us understand the present, then how is it we have largely neglected this central part of our everyday lives?
The more I researched for this essay, the more it became shockingly clear how visual our culture really is. According to David Ciarlo, “advertisements were seen by far more Germans than any colonialist’s talk on tropical hygiene or any museum’s painstaking ethnographic construction”.[2] This made me consider, for example, the quantity of advertisements I see on a daily basis; how many movies I’d seen this year; how often I used Google Maps; even how often I see the Queen’s face on a coin. Although I realise that we now live in a world where we are constantly surrounded by visual media, what really struck me was how frequent these encounters were and how little attention we pay to them. Studying visual culture opens us up to analysing new cross-sections of society, which may have previously been ignored and it is in analysing what these people saw that we might be able to discern how they saw.[3]
However, the difficulty still lies in bridging these two together – the source and ones interpretation of it. Scholars are still grappling with the epistemological challenges of a ‘linguistic turn’ that called into question the meaning of words and language, so to challenge the limitations of images is going to raise even more questions than it answers.
Furthermore from my reading, if one thing is clear it is that we cannot apply the same tools of textual analysis to examine visual sources. Whilst scholars debated the methods of analysis themselves, they were all in agreement that the power of the visual lies in its disorder – that images capture something words can’t. It is precisely in the disorder of the visual that we are required to ask whether there are in fact elements of human experience that we cannot express in words.
It is in dealing with this existential crisis that I began to take visual culture more seriously and realised the monumental task that I have in front of me. I’ve never studied art history so I’m not too sure what they would think of my amateur visual analysis techniques or my infringement into ‘their’ discipline, especially if I’m likely to consciously or unconsciously borrow from my textual analysis techniques. I am treading on very unfamiliar terrain when I look at video reels and photographs and if Edward Said isn’t really sure what to do here, how on earth am I supposed to?
[1] Mitchell, W.J.T, ‘The Panic of the Visual: A Conversation with Edward W. Said” in Edward Said and the Work of the Critic: Speaking Truth to Power, ed. Bové A. Paul (Durham, 2000), p. 31.
[2] David Ciarlo, Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany, (Harvard, 2011), p. 13.
[3] Ibid., p. 17