From the body to the ever-present lens, the world is increasingly preoccupied with the visual. What exactly is the visual' and how can we interpret the multitude of images that bombard us every day?

Reading the Visual takes as its starting point a tacit familiarity with the visual, and shows how we see even ordinary objects through the frameworks and filters of culture and personal experience. It explains how to analyse the mechanisms, conventions, contexts and uses of the visual in western cultures to make sense of visual objects of all kinds.

Drawing on a range of theorists including John Berger, Foucault, Bourdieu and Crary, the authors outline our relationship to the visual, tracing changes to literacies, genres and pleasures affecting ways of seeing from the Enlightenment to the advent of virtual technology.

Reading the Visual is an invaluable introduction to visual culture for readers across the humanities and social sciences.