Contemporaneity (E-Journal)

The editorial introduction to the first issue of Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual Culture

Editors, The

 
 
Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual Culture   http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu 
Vol 1 (2011)   |   ISSN 2155-1162 (online)   |   DOI 10.5195/contemp.2011.31 
 
 
 
Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual 
Culture is a journal of visual culture that explores 
how temporality has acquired visual form in a 
range of different cultural and historical settings. 
Devoted to presenting the diverse ways in which 
time becomes visual as well as how visual culture 
conditions time and our perception of it, 
Contemporaneity aims to publish work that 
grapples with the question of how cultures worldwide and throughout history use images to 
record, define, and confront their historical context and lived experience of the temporal. 
 As historicist master narratives and totalizing theories of the end of history lose their 
relevance for today’s scholars, it has become clear that time is not an empty duration 
unaffected by the events that fill it. In the past century, we became aware that different 
cultures past and present conceive of and value time differently, and that time itself has a 
history. Time is neither homogenous nor blank but is constructed, contested, multiple, and 
asymmetrical, and, moreover, there are many ways of being in time and belonging to it (or 
not belonging to it) that coexist contemporaneously. Taking this complex understanding of 
temporality as its structuring theme, Contemporaneity rethinks the relationship between 
visual culture and time and facilitates understanding of how the present was, is, and will be 
experienced differently depending on both individual and social histories. 
 New scholarship on pre-modern art has increasingly taken time into account, 
examining cultural notions about the present and their profound effects on image-making. As 
we become ever more aware of the disjointedness of our current temporal condition, the 
need for Contemporaneity becomes clearer and clearer. Sharpening our sense of how images 
from the past construe relationships to, with, through, in, and against time will help us to 
grasp features of our own time, such as the persistence of the past in the present or the lost 
faith in a utopian future. Contemporaneity is published in the conviction that all images have 
something unique to tell us about our historical condition, and that they configure the plural 
temporalities of our contemporaneity in ways that deserve our closest attention and most 
rigorous scholarship. 
 We welcome your involvement as both readers and contributors. Contemporaneity will 
be published annually in the spring. Submissions should be sent by August 30 each year. We 
support scholarship on art, architecture, photography, film, and new media as well as texts 
and projects by practitioners working in these areas. 
 
Cristina Albu, Robert Bailey, Saskia Beranek, Brianne Cohen, Heidi Cook, Amy Cymbala, 
Rachel Miller, Yuki Morishima, Sara Sumpter are the Editors of Contemporaneity: Historical 
Presence in Visual Culture. 
About Contemporaneity 
 
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Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual Culture   http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu 
Vol 1 (2011)   |   ISSN 2155-1162 (online)   |   DOI 10.5195/contemp/2011.31 
 
 
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 
United States License. 
 
 
 
This journal is operated by the University Library System of the University of Pittsburgh as part of its 
D-Scribe Digital Publishing Program, and is co-sponsored by the University of Pittsburgh Press. 


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