Visual culture covers research about image cultures and visual practices in different historical contexts and from different theoretical perspectives. The field includes the traditional objects of art history in wider visual contexts.
Visual culture was established as a field of research at the end of the 1980s and is sometimes used as synonymous with visual studies and Bildwissenschaft. The shared point of departure is to explore the visual in relation to questions about for example knowledge, power and desire. Here is included studies of everything from photographic “mugshots” to anatomic plates in early-modern medical literature to the circulation of digital images online. Another focal point within the field is to explore how the use of optical instruments and other mediating technologies historically and today has formed different ways of viewing the world and its visual manifestations.