The Everyday in Visual Culture

This book explores how the comparative analysis of visual cultural artefacts, from objects to architecture and fiction films, can contribute to our understanding of everyday life in homes and cities around the globe.
Investigating the multiple facets of the everyday, this interdisciplinary collection generates a new awareness of everyday lives across cultures and challenges our traditional understanding of the everyday by interweaving new thematic connections. It brings together debates around the analysis of the everyday in visual culture more broadly and explores the creation of innovative technological methods for comparative approaches to the study of the everyday, such as film databases, as well as the celebration of the everyday in museums. The volume is organized around four key themes. It explores the slices of everyday lives found in Visual Culture (Part I), Museums (Part II), the City (Part III) and the Home (Part IV). The book explores the growing area of the analysis of everyday life through visual culture both broadly and in depth.
By building interdisciplinary connections, this book is ideal for the emerging community of scholars and students stemming from Visual Culture, Film and Media Studies, Architecture Studies and practice, Museum Studies, and scholars of Sociology and Anthropology as well as offering fresh insights into cutting-edge tools and practices for the rapidly growing field of Digital Humanities.

François Penz is Emeritus Professor of the Department of Architecture and a fellow of Darwin College, University of Cambridge. Following his monograph, Cinematic Aided Design: An Everyday Life Approach to Architecture (Routledge 2018), he is currently working on a new book, The 100 Films That All Architects Should See (Routledge). Janina Schupp is the SOUTHWORKS Career Development Fellow in Digital Humanities at Jesus College, University of Oxford and an Affiliated Lecturer in Architecture and Moving Images at the University of Cambridge. She is also a documentary film producer and held fellowships at the Library of Congress, Camargo Foundation, and Nanjing University.

Foreword: A Loop Introduction PART I: SLICES OF EVERYDAY LIVES IN VISUAL CULTURE 1. Early film and the construction of everyday life on screen 2. Televising the quotidian: BBC Arena's The Private Life of the Ford Cortina (1982) 3. Everyday practices and lived spaces of refugee children on YouTube 4. The arts of noticing (toward an experimental archive of everyday life) PART II: SLICES OF EVERYDAY LIVES IN MUSEUMS 5. The Museum of Everyday Life 6. The Museum of Ordinary People 7. Everyday life in a heritage village: film as a process of research and engagement 8. Mapping narrative and everyday life in the museum PART III: SLICES OF EVERYDAY LIVES IN THE CITY 9. Imagining the present 10. Contingencies of the everyday: screen representations of Tokyo in 1958 11. "Made in Hong Kong": the (re)production of publicness in the cinematic urban topography of contemporary Hong Kong PART IV: SLICES OF EVERYDAY LIVES IN THE HOME 12. CineMuseSpace: a cinematic exploration of the minor magic of everyday life 13. Indian cinema as a database for socio-energy behaviour in chawls 14. Domestic moods: mood catchers and makers