The turn and the image

a theoretical history of the pictoria-iconic-visual turn and its implications in the human sciences

Abstract

This text historicizes the composition of the visual turn and its importance to the humanities in the contemporaneity. In Brazil, the debate was introduced by Ulpiano Meneses in an anthological article, with perspectives later amplified by Paulo Knauss. The proposal of this article is: to highlight the double baptism of the turning to the image: in the USA, in 1992, as pictorial turn by William John Thomas Mitchell in the emergence of visual studies; and in Germany, in 1994, as iconic turn by Gottfried Boehm on the basis of the current Bildwissenschaft (Science of Image), an issue poorly debated in Brazil. Then, unfoldings of the use of the expression are presented, the transformation of the pictorial turn into a visual turn in the passage from the 1990s to the 2000s, and the approximations between the North American and the German aspects from mid 2000s, which would cause a return to the original proposals. At the end of the text we synthesize his proposals for the humanities and the studies of material culture. The pictorial/iconic /visual turn is taken as an absolute metaphor, a field of problematization, whose understanding must be activated by its historicization as academic debate and diagnosis on issues of the past and contemporary world.