a visual journal of maldives

Ours is a visual culture. Our workplaces are visually saturated environments and our dominant pastimes (films, television, video games, and the Internet) are visual media. Moreover, we communicate visually when we are trying to cross over cultural boundaries. Think, for example, of graphics devised for international signage. Knowledge is often communicated visually – scientists chart brain activity, economists graph fiscal trends, geographers map territory and detectives photograph evidence. We all participate in Visual Culture. We are ‘informed’ by Visual Culture in the sense that our behavior is affected by, and Visual Culture affects our behavior: think of various signs we encounter in our daily life – road signs, various signs giving directions inside buildings such as hospitals banks, supermarkets, etc.

a head carved from limestone, pre-Islamic period (before 1153 AD), possible used as Buddhist or Hindhu icon, now kept at the National Museum of Maldives. Photo: M Hilmy, 2005

A view of an island in the Maldives (from the air: from a seaplane), 2005

Visual Culture is concerned with everything we see, have seen, or may visualize.

These include: paintings, sculptures, utensils, gardens, dance, buildings, artifacts, landscape, toys, advertising, jewelry, apparel, light, graphs, maps, websites, and dreams.

In short, all aspects of culture that communicate through visual means.

Methodologies are drawn from the arts, humanities, sciences and social sciences in studying Visual Culture.

Focus is on production and deception, and on intention and deployment. And institutional, economic, political, social ideological and market factors are considered.

The visual is studied as a reflection of culture and as something that has cultural efficacy in its own right, contributing to the production, reproduction, and mutation of culture.

Rather than locate the significance of visual objects in their inherent properties, most Visual Culture scholarship looks at the uses to which people put the visual – the practice of Visual Culture, or how Visual Culture is practiced/ manifest in practice.