Visual Essayists in a Contemporary Climate and a Digital Future

This article focuses on the visual essay as a cinematic form, its roots in the literary essay, and how it stands today. To attempt to define the form, I look to a wide array of scholars and thinkers, from Rascaroli to Shanspeare. I consider how twenty-first-century technology has changed how visual essays are made and distributed, and what they hope to achieve. I ask to what extent mainstream, Hollywood, and independent visual essays blur into one another, and have negative or positive impacts. And I lovingly conclude that the visual essay, above all else, is increasingly a form of faults.