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Visual Impact: Culture and the Meaning of Images

The single-author book draws upon the visual arts and visual anthropology to provide an examination of changing patterns of visual representation and their social and cultural determinants. Based on a wide range of visual imagery, the volume provides a systematic approach to analysing images. It not only reflects the author’s interests in cognitive processes and visual narrativity, but also it analyses his practice-based research in digital interactivity and demonstrates how theory and practice can inform each other.

The book reconsiders, re-evaluates and extends the author’s earlier research in interactive media to provide a deeper, more detailed and specialised approach to issues established in some of his earlier refereed publications. Examples include the visual representation of disaster and subsequent refugee crises, and the creation of an interactive ethnography of a village in the Czech Republic. Since its publication (in December 2008), themes of the book have been updated, extended and widened debate to new contexts and audiences in the social sciences – for instance, Wright, T. 2012 “Visual Culture, Ethnography and Interactive Media” in A Companion to the Anthropology of Europe. Ed. U Kockel, M. Craith & J. Frykman. Oxford: Blackwell. ISBN: 9781405190732 pp. 497-518 and “From the Disaster to the Screen: Refugees and the Media” (currently in press) - invited chapter for The Oxford Handbook of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies (edited by Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, Loescher, Long & Sigona), Oxford University Press.

Reviewed by international refereed journal Visual Studies Sept 2009

Reviewed by international refereed journal Contemporary Sociology Volume 39 (1): 96. Jan 2010.