The category of "visual culture" encompasses the range of images which circulate within our social and cultural worlds. "Visual culture" may include prestigious forms of image-making, such as high art painting, or less respectable forms, such as the popular cultural imagery of advertising and television. Painters and photographers have used images of crime for a variety of purposes: to Aprove prejudices about the criminal personality, to aestheticize the contemporary city, to raise metaphysical issues of life and death, to transgress cultural norms of tastefulness and acceptability and so on. These various uses of crime within visual forms will be a central focus of the course
View complete course outline: COMS354A2010 [.pdf]