French Literature Reviews - 2026
Andrea Pinotti, Antonio Somaini, Visual Culture
Art and Visual Culture
Translated from Italian by Sophie Burdet and Marine Aubry-Morici
Original title: Cultura visuale. Immagini sguardi media dispositivi, Giulio Einaudi editore, 2016)
A comprehensive overview of visual culture studies, tracing its origins in art history through to the current perspectives opened up by new technologies, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence. This book introduces the fundamental concepts, core questions, and emerging research directions within the field of "visual culture studies".
After tracing the origins of the concept within the art historical tradition and early 20th-century theories of photography and cinema, the book examines the recent international development of visual culture studies and Bildwissenschaft. Subsequent chapters provide essential tools for analyzing the technically conditioned, as well as historically and socially situated, dimensions of images and visual forms.
The examples analyzed span a wide variety of cultural contexts and historical periods, extending to virtual and augmented reality, novel AI-generated imagery, and emerging machine vision technologies.
Read an excerpt on the publisher's website…
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"Synthesizing contemporary debates on the nature and functions of images produced by technical devices, Andrea Pinotti and Antonio Somaini expand the field of the visible to encompass many largely overlooked uses of the image. Highly didactic in approach, Visual Culture can be read as a textbook. Above all, it offers a rich synthesis of theoretical scholarship on the image in general, and the moving image in particular [...]. As the reading progresses, however, it also emerges [...] as a cutting-edge essay engaging with contemporary French-language scholarship on new theories of images produced by technical devices [...]. Visual Culture thus proves to be a work that is both retrospective and prospective regarding contemporary transformations in image cultures. [Its publication] helps set an ambitious agenda for a new generation committed to a broader understanding of the socio-cultural phenomena surrounding the image." — Barnabé Sauvage, La Vie des idées
Read the article: "Can We Imagine the 21st Century?"…
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Andrea Pinotti is Professor of Aesthetics and Image Theory at the Università Statale of Milan, where he directs the ERC project "An-Icon" dedicated to the history and theory of immersive environments. His publications include the volumes Empathy: History of an Idea from Plato to the Posthuman (Vrin, 2016) and Alla soglia dell'immagine. Da Narciso alla realtà virtuale (Einaudi, 2021).
Antonio Somaini is Professor of film, media, and visual culture theory at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle. His main publications include the book Ejzenštejn. Il cinema, le arti, il montaggio (Einaudi, 2011), as well as co-editing the volumes Rethinking the Medium: Cinema and Contemporary Art (Les presses du réel, 2022) and La haute et la basse définition des images (Mimésis, 2021). Along with Emmanuel Alloa, Emanuele Coccia, and Emanuele Quinz, he co-directs the book series Médias/Théories at Presses du réel.
Rooted in the broader tradition of art history and German Bildwissenschaft, the volume maps the evolution of image studies from early twentieth-century reflections on photography and cinema to contemporary media theory. Andrea Pinotti and Antonio Somaini structure their analysis around foundational concepts such as the gaze, technical devices, and visual media, situating these ideas within international scholarly debates. By examining how images are historically situated and technically conditioned, the authors provide essential analytical tools for students and researchers navigating the complex landscape of modern image cultures.
The book will prove especially useful for scholars in aesthetics, media theory, and art history who seek to understand the profound transformations brought by digital technologies. Addressing cutting-edge developments such as augmented reality, machine vision, and artificial intelligence, the work helps readers question the shifting boundaries of the visible. It serves equally as an accessible textbook for university courses and a sophisticated essay engaging with contemporary French-language scholarship on technical images, making it a valuable resource for anyone exploring the socio-cultural phenomena of visual media.