The Everyday in Visual Culture: Slices of Lives

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 an Emeritus Professor of the Architecture Department, Cambridge University. His AHRC project CineMuseSpace (2017-20) expanded to China and Japan, ideas developed in his monograph Cinematic Aided Design: An Everyday Life Approach to Architecture (2017). He is currently writing a monograph The 100 Films That All Architects Should See (2022/23).

Janina Schupp is the SOUTHWORKS Career Development Fellow in Digital Humanities at Jesus College, University of Oxford and Affiliated Lecturer in Architecture and Moving Images at the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on the impact of audio-visual representations and digital technologies on urban space.