Overview : framing visual texts for ecomedia studies

Framing, both aesthetic and ideological, is integral to the construction of visual images. Photography, film, and comics all rely upon framing to shape viewer/reader perceptions and to express a particular point of view via choices about visual perspective. As the essays in this section make clear, this concept of framing is of special importance to ecocritics, since matters of point of view and vision are so dramatically at stake in works grappling with environmental and interspecies issues. Framing, and the aesthetics of the image within a frame, shape how artists and their audiences perceive the environment. Since the emergence of media and cultural studies in the 1960s and '70s, film and media texts have been analyzed through different conceptual frames such as gender, class, and race. Taking an environmental turn over the past decade, scholarship in media studies has increasingly placed a wider range of texts into ecocritical contexts. We should now ask of any text - be it a comic strip, a photograph, or a film - what does it tell us about the environment? How does it reflect humans' complex relationships with the more-than-human world? Every text can now be framed and read from an ecocritical perspective.