South African visual culture

Abstract

Many books have been published in the last few years on South African visual arts, to fill glaring historical gaps in the market. Nonetheless, South African visual culture is unique in that it is the first book to appear in South Africa on our visual culture (according to Mirzoeff in the Foreword, the first in Africa). 'Visual culture' refers to the predominantly visual images that surround, even engulf, us daily, which we must engage with critically because such images are not neutral but are constructed, one might also say 'contaminated', by ideology. Thus the aim of the book is to examine images from popular culture, such as advertisements, shopping malls, clothing, popular magazines, digital media, photography, cinema and television, in order to bring to the light their gender, race and identity politics. The writers include a number of South Africa's most highly regarded art academics, a sure sign that it is aimed at specialist readers and students of visual culture, rather than at the general reader.