tripleC 12(1): 202-213, 2014 http://www.triple-c.at CC: Creative Commons License, 2014. Critical Visual Theory – Introduction Peter Ludes * , Winfried Nöth ** , Kathrin Fahlenbrach *** * Mass Communication, Jacobs University Bremen, p.ludes@jacobs-university.de ** Cognitive Semiotics, Catholic University of São Paulo, Brazil, noeth@uni-kassel.de *** Media Studies, University of Hamburg, Germany, kathrin.fahlenbrach@uni-hamburg.de Abstract: The studies selected for publication in this special issue on Critical Visual Theory can be divided into three thematic groups: (1) image making as power making, (2) commodification and re- canonization, and (3) approaches to critical visual theory. The approaches to critical visual theory adopted by the authors of this issue may be subsumed under the following headings (3.1) critical visu- al discourse and visual memes in general and Anonymous visual discourse in particular, (3.2) collec- tive memory and gendered gaze, and (3.3) visual capitalism, global north and south. Keywords: Critical Visual Theory, Visual Communication, Digital Cultures, Protest, Semiotics, Visual Discourse, Collective Memories, Gendered Gazes, Visual Capitalism 1. “Image Making is Power Making” This special issue on Critical Visual Theory presents papers selected from submissions in reply to the editors’ Call for Paper to provide critical insights into economic, technical, politi- cal, cultural, and ecological aspects of transnational and global visual communication. The editors’ aim was to present studies that make use of critical theories appropriate to advance critical research in visual information technologies, formats, and narratives in general and of strategies of veiling financial, military, economic, religious interests in particular. As was to be expected, papers covering a broad range of current topics from a plurality of perspectives were submitted. Those accepted for publication offer indeed possible answers to many of the questions raised in the editors’ Call for Papers. Nevertheless, some current topics addressed in the editors’ Call were not among the topics dealt with by the contributors. For example, none of the submissions addresses the hot topic of visual surveillance, which is presently attracting much social, political, and cultural attention after the enormous growth of mobile social online media in private and public spheres. However, the editors of this issue can rec- ommend readers interested in this topic to consult the papers on visual surveillance by Fuchs (2012 and 2013), Hyunjin and McAllister (2011), Netchitailova (2011), and Santaella (2011) as complements to the present issue. The ubiquity of images and imagery in the mass media and in public online spheres across the media and across national borders calls for a Critical Visual Theory. In most mod- ern societies, the print media have been the predominant public forum for the distribution of information. Thus, verbal modes of argumentation have been hegemonic. Today, by con- trast, we are faced with “flows of messages and images,” as Manuel Castells (1996, 508) put it, which have become the “basic thread of our social structure,” and we have now reached a point where “image making is power making” (ibid. 507). Nevertheless, the visual networks that have arisen from the ubiquitous spread of images in the media have not yet attracted the attention of researchers that they deserve. Castells himself did not study this development very closely, not even in his more recent publications. Nye (2011, xiii), by contrast, has shown that visual narratives contribute to “the public determination of legitimacy, good and evil – and the shaping of the preferences of one’s opponents.” Will Critical Visual Theory be able to make the complex social relations behind this development more “transparent?” In his Introduction to the third edition of his The Visual Culture Reader, Mirzoeff (2013, xxxv) argues that “critical visuality studies need to be the place of intersection for the analysis