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Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture by Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright
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"Practices of Looking explains contemporary theoretical debates in a lucid and highly engaging way. It uses this theoretical foundation to investigate and illuminate our complex encounters with visual culture. Numerous examples from advertising, art, science, television, and the internet give the text a variety, liveliness, and contemporary relevance that students will enjoy. The authors are to be congratulated for a comprehensive, intelligent, clearly written, and engaging introductory text."
Heather Dawkins, School for the Contemporary Arts, Simon Fraser University
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This comprehensive and engaging introduction to visual culture provides an overview of a range of theories about how we understand visual media and how we use images to express ourselves, to communicate, to experience pleasure, and to learn.
Using over 175 illustrations, Professors Sturken and Cartwright examine how images - paintings, prints, photographs, film, television, video, advertisements, news images, the Internet, digital images, and science images - gain meaning in different cultural arenas, from art and commerce to science and the law, how they travel globally and in distinct cultures, and how they are an integral and important aspect of our lives. These images are analyzed in relation to a range of cultural and representational issues (desire, power, the gaze, bodies, sexuality, ethnicity) and methodologies (semiotics, marxism, psychoanalysis, feminism, postcolonial theory).
Practices of Looking provides an explanation of the fundamentals of these theories while presenting visual examples of how they function. Central concepts such as ideology, the concept of the spectator, the role of reproduction in visual culture, the mass media and the public sphere, consumer culture, and postmodernism, among others, are explained in depth and in accessible, informative language.
Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright provide the best introductory book for students coming to the study of visual culture for the first time. Truly interdisciplinary, this book aims to be the key text for courses across a range of disciplines including media and film studies, art history, photography, and communication media.
About the Authors
Marita Sturken is Associate Professor at the University of Southern California, teaching cultural studies, popular culture, and issues of technology and culture. She previously worked as a critic in independent film and video, and is the author of; Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic and the Politics of Remembering, University of California Press (1997) and Thelma and Louise, British Film Institute Modern Classics Series (2000).
Lisa Cartwright is Associate Professor at the University of Rochester, and Director of the Susan B. Institute for Gender and Women's Studies. She is the author of Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine's Visual Culture and co-editor of The Visible Woman: Imaging Technologies, Gender and Science.
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