Das visuelle Zeitalter. Punkt und Pixel

Gerhard Paul’s history of visual practices and artifacts in Germany from the mid-nineteenth century to the present wants to be a summative overview of more than two decades of research in the field of German visual history and the representative starting point for a new series of publications dedicated to the field of images and visual history in Germany. It presents more than 900 images and 760 pages of text set in unusually small font, signalling the author’s intention to provide a comprehensive history of the development of visual practices in Germany that establishes the development of media technologies and the history of iconography and visual motifs as a history in its own right, alongside the political, social and cultural history of modern Germany. Paul’s monograph is based on extensive research and attempts to address both academic readers and a more general audience. At the core of the book lies Paul’s concept of the emergence of what he calls ‘visual man’ in response to the unprecedented increase in the number and availability of various types of images from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards. Beginning with the invention of photography and intensified by new techniques of disseminating images, Paul charts the rise of a ‘visual age’ which has inaugurated a host of new image practices and, in his view, increasingly favoured visual evidence over the printed word. Images, or so the author claims, began to dominate modern societies, providing powerful symbolic representations of national identities as well as the dominant media of increasingly immersive mass entertainment. The dominance of visual media in modern culture is portrayed as a corollary of wider processes of globalization and acceleration and ‘visual man’ as the product of these development emerges as a post-bourgeois character who is at home in a globalized world that is regulated and represented primarily by images.

Art · Art history · German · Iconography · Social history (medicine) · Visual arts · Visual culture · European history and politics · Historical Influence and Diplomacy · History · Visual Culture and Art Theory

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