"Visual culture" incorporates a number of different visual practices including art, design, performance, architecture, film and photography. The study of visual culture is interdisciplinary, deriving in part from the new art history that emerged in the 1980s, the developing studies of design and material culture, and film, as well as the concepts and methods associated with psychoanalysis, semiotics, gender, class and post-colonialism. This collection is composed of essential articles written by the most stimulating academics working in the field of visual studies today.

These texts represent both the formation of visual culture and the ways in which it has transformed, and continues to transform, our understanding and experience of the world as a visual domain. Each volume is divided into three sections, with the first two providing a substantive collection of texts that interrogate the theme of each volume, and the last delivering a relevant case study that addresses the issues discussed.