Journal of Visual Culture is an international refereed journal that welcomes compelling, critically engaged contributions that explore and expand trans-disciplinary global visual cultures.


Our August 2019 Issue, new Editorial Group members and IAVC+JVC Early Career Research Prize.


The past year has been one of transformations for Journal of Visual Culture. In April we launched a new design for our print and electronic formats, always striving to provide the best content and experience for our readers. During this process, we also welcomed three additions to our Editorial Group: Professor Øyvind Vågnes (University of Bergen, Norway), who has taken on responsibility for overseeing our themed issues; Professor Jae Emerling (The University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA), who comes in as our new Media Editor; and Dr Manca Bajec, (Royal College of Art, UK), as Managing Editor. We are thrilled to have them on board!

We are also proud to announce a new collaboration with the International Association of Visual Culture for creating the Early Career Researcher Prize, to provide current doctoral students and recent PhDs with the opportunity to publish an original research paper in JVC. More details and submission guidelines can be found here.


In our new open issue:
  • Nicole Starosielski articulates thermal vision as a perceptual mode that both extends beyond the infrared camera to a broader set of practices of seeing heat as well as beyond the militarized view to scientific, commercial, and cultural landscapes.

  • The Lebanese artist and filmaker Akram Zaatari is interviewed by Elisa Adami, and reflects on his longstanding work with photographic heritage in the Middle East, North Africa and Arab diaspora, and considers the different ways in which he has used photographs to illuminate and unfold historical truths.

  • Jessica Balanzategui traces the lineages of digital storytelling over the past decade to identify the emergence of a genre, particularly preoccupied with dead and residual media, and with the interface between technological and personal change. 

  • Magda Szcześniak and Łukasz Zaremba analyse practices of contemporary iconoclastic gestures directed at monuments, examining the differences between recent iconoclastic acts (sometimes ‘progressive’, other times deeply conservative) in the United States and in Poland.

  • MIT scholar and MacArthur Fellow Lisa Parks is interviewed by Asbjørn Grønstad and Øyvind Vågnes on the dialectics of distance and proximity in media and surveillance technologies, and how their historical transformations and new manifestations redefine profoundly discussions around them.

  • Book reviews include titles by Michele Greet, Terry Kugan, Catherine Russell, and Tom Holert.

@JVCJournal on Twitter


In this issue:

Nicole Starosielski
Thermal vision

Akram Zaatari
History and photographic memory

Jessica Balanzategui
Creepypasta, ‘Candle Cove’, and the digital gothic

Magda Szcześniak and Łukasz Zaremba
Paranoid looking: on de-communization

Lisa Parks
Televisual epistemologies and beyond
Reviews Alexandra Dodd
Terry Kurgan, Everyone Is Present: Essays on Photography, Memory and Family

Jennifer Gagliardi
Catherine Russell, Archiveology: Walter Benjamin and Archival Film Practices

Tom Holert
Out of the Immersion Zone, by Tom Holert

Julián Serna
Michele Greet, Transatlantic Encounters: Latin American Artists in Paris between the Wars