Library Research Guides: ENG 286: The Gay 1990s and Beyond: Visual Analysis Resources

Guides to Doing Visual Analysis

Evaluating Images
A guided series of questions to ask as you analyze images (from the University of Washington Tacoma Library)
How To Analyze an Advertisement
A helpful series of questions (excerpted from Signs in Contemporary Culture: An Introduction to Semiotics by Arthur Asu Berger) from the Center for Media Literacy website
Visual Analysis Project Overview
Steps 3 and 4 of this project overview provide good guidance for describing an image concretely and then analyzing how the pieces fit together to convey a message.

See the LGBTQ Archives & Collections page for many more options for finding cultural artifacts for visual analysis.

JSTOR Image Search
Search across a wide variety of content from universities, museums, and community and private collections.

Artstor This link opens in a new window
Digitized images of art, architecture, and other forms of visual culture from around the world, from museums, archaeology, photo archives, slide collections, and art reference works, dating from B.C.E. to present.

Requires creation of an Artstor account to download images. This account also grants you off-campus access for 60 days. If your account is inactivated or you need to create an account, make sure to use a library link (such as this one) to get to Artstor so that you will be recognized as a Wellesley user.
Vogue Archive This link opens in a new window
A complete searchable archive of American Vogue, reproduced in high-resolution color page images.
Dates: 1892 CE-Present

NYPL Digital Collections
Provides free and open access to over 800,000 images digitized from the The New York Public Library's vast collections, including illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, rare prints, photographs and more.
Finding Images (Wellesley College Art Library Research guide)

In Visible Archives: Queer and Feminist Visual Culture in the 1980s by Margaret Galvan
Publication Date: 2023
Explores a number of feminist and cultural touchstones--the feminist sex wars, the HIV/AIDS crisis, the women in print movement, and countercultural grassroots periodical networks--and examines how visual culture interacts with these pivotal moments.
Protest!: A History of Social and Political Protest Graphics by Liz McQuiston
Publication Date: 2019
This richly illustrated history of six centuries of global protest art includes chapters on "Gay Liberation and Pride," "Lesbian and Gay Activism," "The AIDS Crisis," and "LGBT Issues."
After Silence: : A History of AIDS through Its Images by Avram Finkelstein
Publication Date: 2018
Cofounder of the collective Silence = Death and member of the art collective Gran Fury, Avram Finkelstein tells the story of how his work and other protest artwork associated with the early years of the pandemic were created.
Outlooks: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities and Visual Cultures by Peter Horne (Editor); Reina Lewis (Editor)
Publication Date: 1996
Explores the relationship of lesbian and gay sexualities to visual representation. It reflects the richness of lesbian and gay ways of producing and reading visual cultures, at the same time as it tackles such burning issues as the advantage of adopting a queer perspective on past art, the responses of lesbian and gay artists to the AIDS crisis, and society's attempts to censor homosexual art