The Images Decide
How visual culture chooses what—and who—we worship
Core Question
Are images passive or do they demand our attention and action? Today, we’re inundated by visuals that are the fabric of our culture: memories, screens, objects, billboards, maps, landscapes, and more. Yet, none of this visual culture is neutral. It is an active system that decides what we see, what remains invisible, and which faces are elevated into archetypes that become brands, idols, or core cultural myths.
The question posited by Boylan is this: who decides what becomes visible, and whose image becomes powerful enough to count?
As someone who works in advertising—producing images of this kind—I can’t pretend I stand outside this system. Visual culture shapes our world but we simultaneously are the power behind it.
Snapshot: What Boylan Gives Us
According to Boylan, visual culture is what is seen or unseen. This definition matters because it dissolves the old art historical canon and exposes the power structures beneath it. “Great art” wasn’t born; it was named—often by institutions deeply invested in maintaining social hierarchies. Visual culture, by contrast, reveals the messy totality of how societies imagine themselves and who gets to appear within those stories.
In this framework, images (visual culture) want things from us. Images incite, seduce, overwhelm, discipline, and sometimes trap. It shapes what is desirable or dangerous, worthy or unworthy. With the level of saturation of imagery currently in the world—campaigns, selfies, surveillance footage, AI training data—the stakes of who gets seen and who remains invisible are high.
Power: Who Controls the Frame?
Visibility is never an accident. It is curated, engineered, and often taken.
Consider the case of the 2018 FUNAI footage of the last uncontacted man in the Amazon. Millions watched a man who had never seen a camera and never consented to being observed. His existence was captured, framed, and distributed by people with technology he could not imagine. The cameraman’s whisper—“zoom”—is almost a thesis statement about power. The global gaze becomes a kind of infringement on privacy and freedom to be.
Another case is an image of a drowned father and daughter used first by news outlets, then recirculated on a CBP (Customs Border Patrol) Facebook page to make an ideological point regarding immigration policies. Nothing about the image changed except context, and yet meaning shifted entirely. Boylan is explicit: at a certain point, permission no longer matters. Circulation can override authorship.
These examples reveal the architecture of visibility:
States use imagery to define crisis or legitimacy
Corporations use algorithms to amplify or bury content
Museums decide what counts as “art” and what lives in the margins
Platforms (Facebook, Google) determine what we see through opaque systems
Museums in particular have long functioned as gatekeepers, pulling objects from their cultural contexts and placing them inside spaces that teach viewers not just what to look at but how to look. To descendants of communities whose artifacts were seized, being placed in a museum is not an honor but a wound.
Visibility is structured by power; images reflect the desires of those who control the frame.
Bodies and Identity: Who Gets Seen?
Bodies, particularly human ones, and their identities are also subject to the frame of visual culture. They can transmute into symbols—legible, manageable, stripped-down versions of their complexity. A body could be a hero, a threat, a victim, a genius, a beauty standard, or a stereotype. Rarely is someone allowed to remain simply human when presented within visual culture’s constructs.
This flattening is familiar to anyone who has been misread through an image. Early in social media’s rise, I once had a woman tell me that my selfies were “too sexual,” even though I was simply looking at the camera with a soft expression, fully covered. Her interpretation became a label I had to carry—one I had no control over. This is the power of the gaze: it leaves a lasting social mark.
Then there is the female body which appears to remain historically engineered for public consumption, meant to be looked at, judged, or claimed. Can we reinvent the relationship between viewer and subject? According to Mirzeoff’s “right to look”, a possible answer lies in the idea that the look must be mutual, rooted in equality and recognition. Yet, despite our best efforts, the current visual culture is founded on surveillance, misinterpretation, and asymmetrical powers. Even the selfie—which seems like an attempt to reclaim control—gets hijacked by the viewer’s framing, by platform algorithms, by the social scripts projected onto certain bodies.
Visibility is no longer a form of liberation but a reminder of the power of the human gaze on the image.
Infrastructure: How Images Move
Images don’t just exist; they travel, circulate, and land in distant parts of the world we sometimes are unaware of.
Photography, film, broadcast television—these are the early infrastructures of visibility. Today, virality and algorithmic curation shape what becomes iconic and what disappears entirely. Online platforms now function like modern museums: they decide what floats into circulation and what sinks into digital oblivion.
The infrastructure of visual culture includes:
Algorithms that determine visibility
Surveillance systems that capture bodies without consent
Museums that rewrite cultural meaning
Social feeds that shape what “everyone” seems to be looking at
AI systems trained on biased datasets that reproduce historical hierarchies
This is another aspect of visual culture that isn’t entirely neutral. The photo reposted on a CBP page is stripped of its original news article context and repurposed with a different intent and the video of an uncontacted man becomes a spectacle. In examining the movement of image, Boylan’s metaphor of visual culture as a vortex is fitting. Some images rise into collective consciousness; others are swallowed whole. The power of the dominant culture decides who or what becomes visible and what remains invisible.
Meaning-Making: How Images Become Myths
Meaning does not reside in the image itself. It forms in the interactions between image, viewer, context, and repetition.
Kitsch, as Boylan describes it, is a kind of seductive banality—images that are too sweet, too easy, too comforting. Clement Greenberg compared it to eating too much candy. But even “fluffy” images carry ideology; they script what beauty or desire should look like. Museums perform a similar ideological function. Labels like “primitive,” “exotic,” or “naive” tell viewers who belongs inside cultural legitimacy and who remains outside. These categories are not descriptors—they are myths disguised as taxonomy. Political posters, brand campaigns, celebrity portraits, influencer grids—these all teach viewers how to read certain poses, colors, and gestures as trustworthy, rebellious, or superior. Repetition cements these readings into cultural “truth.” A person becomes a symbol; a symbol becomes a logo; a logo becomes a myth. Myth is what happens when the image overtakes the human. Climate imagery is a myth-making machine too. The visual of a splitting Antarctic ice shelf, endlessly repeated, turns into a narrative of inevitable apocalypse—so overwhelming that viewers often look away. The image becomes not a call to action, but a story we feel powerless to alter. In Boylan’s framing, images don’t just reflect our world—they instruct us in how to feel about it.
Field Note for People Who Make Images
What is the purpose and intent of this essay? It’s mostly a deep personal regard for integrity, awareness, growth and that sharing growth. Consider it a brief field guide—an introduction to an angle of visual culture that may or may not have been considered, especially within advertising. Advertising can sometimes appear disjointed from culture(s), yet the decisions we make visually are never separate from the frameworks outlined above. Yes, we (as advertising professionals) strive to create diverse imagery, but I’ve also witnessed narrow categorizations and reductive labels around race, identity, and ethnicity.
Thus, even if you have heard parts or all of the above before, don’t disregard it entirely. I encourage you, as I encourage myself, to interrogate your what, where, who, and when as you contribute to visual culture. If you work in visual communications—creatives, strategists, influencers, coaches, leaders—you are not outside of visual culture. You are shaping it. Every image carries a worldview. Every campaign distributes power. Every aesthetic choice encodes assumptions about beauty, worthiness, inclusion, and truth.
Boylan reminds us: no visual object exists in isolation.
So the minimum ethical ask is this:
Know what you are encoding
Understand who benefits from your image’s visibility
Pay attention to who is missing from the frame
Don’t confuse the symbol with the soul
Images can jail or liberate, flatten or reveal. The question is not whether we participate in visual culture’s power structures—we already do. The real question is whether we participate with care.
Source:
Boylan, A. L. (2020). Visual culture. MIT Press.
