Ikonologiczne inspiracje w badaniu kultury współczesnej

There are many perspectives, turns, tendencies and paradigms in the history of cultural studies. Notwithstanding the considerable advance in civilization, there are also such viewpoints which draw on the iconological traditions worked out in earlier centuries. The contemporary reflection on visual culture makes references to such figures as Erwin Panofsky or Aby Warburg. The proclamation of the so called iconic turn in the humanities by W. J. T. Mitchell provoked many novel debates focused on the domination of images and various aspects of visual communication. It is worth stressing that apart from meta-discourses, there started to emerge methodologies which made it possible to apply those theories in the research practice. This resulted in the emergence of such subdisciplines as visual sociology and visual anthropology and gave an opportunity the transdisciplinary testing of a new repertoire of research tactics based on images (photo/video essays, video/photographic documentation, photoblog analyses, ethnography/sociology of the media etc.). It must be also noticed that the enthusiasts of those methods have a considerable awareness of the existence of many traps and limitations and the fact that solving one problem often leads to dozens of other problems