"The Visual Culture Reader" is a good introduction to some of the issues touched on visual and cultural studies, highlighting the most common areas of scholar work developed in the last decades, which is part of the framing of visual culture as a body of study. The volume is an updated second edition from 2002 after an original edition from 98. While the update is cogent with the date of its publication, some items have not aged terribly well, in particular those regarding digital theorization, new media and changes in communication experienced since the publication. Nevertheless, this is a relatively small part of the book and the rest of the selection, while very diverse in quality and breadth, still offer a solid outlook into some aspects of visual culture theory.
However the volume feels less authoritative, or comprehensive in its scope than what it might aim to project, at least not so much in the selected material itself but the gaps in areas, such as contemporary art, urban development, or social equity to name but a few, as they relate to visual culture that do not seem adequately covered. Likewise, the topics selected are ,while somewhat logical, a bit trite and predictable as some of the most recurring topics observed in this area of research. And with some exceptions often rather than sensing that one is faced by a selection of essential samplings of currents of research and thought withing the different topics, one feels to be reading random - if often interesting - research and analysis in those areas but not the pivotal texts that a reader might be expected to offer.
But in a way the breadth and nature of this selection, also becomes an asset in actually illustrating recurring patterns, musings, and doubts around the systematic and difficult framing of visual culture.
The interplay of "visual culture" alongside or vs. "cultural studies" is not very well resolved in the reader, and while the explorations offered are not discardable for an introduction in the topic, for a far broader perspective, the older and generalistic readers on cultural studies, such as the one edited by Simon During, seem more relevant and less aged. It is not so much that we need a different " Visual Culture Reader" but that this one 7 years after its publication does need an update.
