Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture [Paperback]

Marita Sturken (Author), Lisa Cartwright (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 15, 2001 | ISBN-10: 0198742711 | ISBN-13: 978-0198742715 | Edition: 1st

Ideal for students studying visual culture for the first time, Practices of Looking explores the ways we use and understand images. Truly interdisciplinary, this comprehensive and engaging introduction can be used in courses across a range of disciplines including media and film studies, communications, art history, and photography. Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright examine the diverse range of recent approaches to visual analysis and lead students through key theories on visual culture, providing explanations of the fundamentals of these theories and presenting visual examples of how they function. Using over 175 illustrations, they examine how images--paintings, prints, photographs, film, television, video, advertisements, news images, the Internet, digital images, and images from science--gain meaning in different cultural arenas, from art and commerce to science and the law. They also consider how these images travel globally and in distinct cultures; how they are an integral and important aspect of our lives. The 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). Central topics 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 are explained in depth.

Editorial Reviews

Review

This is a great book and I think it will be very useful to those teaching visual communication (and visual culture) courses. Professor Sandra Moriarty, Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Colorado

This volume is a comprehensive and compelling introduction to the wide range body of critical thought that is now being combined under the banner of visual culture. Nick Mirzoeff, Department of Art, SUNY at Stony Brook

This strikes me as an excellent book. It is one of those rare texts that is extremely clear, introductory but not pedestrian; it flows so easily that is seems like it must have been a pleasure for the authors to write. Professor Amelia Jones, Department of Art History, University of California, Riverside

`Overall, Practices of Looking is a superb text for both beginning and advanced students in visual culture and communications related coursesThe text is both easily understood and engaging to the reader, and presented in a manner that allows for thorough absorbtion of most topics.' Joel Davies, Creighton University

About the Author

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

Product Details

• Paperback: 385 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; 1st edition (March 15, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0198742711
• ISBN-13: 978-0198742715
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #180,107 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #62 in Books > Arts & Photography > Performing Arts > Reference

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Very Useful Text for Teaching, January 8, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (Paperback)

This is a well-organized text for teaching introductory undergraduate courses in visual culture, media studies or art history. I used it in a course I taught last semester and the students seemed to get a lot out of it. It provides a broad overview of critical approaches and methodologies for understanding and analyzing art, photography, painting, film and electronic media. One of its strengths is the way it facilitates thinking about images across disciplines and cultural realms from art to popular culture and from the fields of law to science and medicine. The book has many good illustrations that support the concepts discussed.

15 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Review of Chapter Nine, September 30, 2003

By 

Mark Montri (Rochester, MI) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (Paperback)

As a class assignment, I closely studied chapter nine of <i>Practices of Looking</i>, and researched several of the listed source materials. This chapter is entitled "The Global Flow of Visual Culture" and deals with the globalization of Western media, primarily in the form of television and the internet. The authors explore such topics as the history of media globalization, its effects on non-western cultures, pros and cons of the internet, and possibilities that new global technologies afford us.
This chapter was well-presented, persuasive, and useful. It offered a cohesive and informative discussion of a broad variety of topics, dealing with each one in satisfactory depth and detail. After researching a few of the listed sources, I found that while some of them seemed to be surplus to the actual chapter content, those that were used were, on the whole, represented accurately and fairly.
I recommend this book to anyone studying visual culture, due to its detailed and informative treatment of this broad and varied topic.

18 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good introduction to visual culture, but with a few problems, April 24, 2003

By 

Adrian K. Adams (Jackson, MI) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (Paperback)

Visual culture is one of the most difficult subjects that I have taken in four years of college. Sturken and Cartwright attempt to combine the study of art, philosophy, and sociology into a single book. Still, I feel that Practices of Looking is overall well written and does a good job at simplifying the writings and ideas of some of the centuries most noteworthy theorists. Each chapter and subject is clearly laid out and described, while examples and images are effectively and abundantly used. Although I felt that the book is a good introduction for those who have no prior background with the subject, I found there to be several problems.

One problem was that Sturken and Cartwright occasionally either contradicts themselves, or poorly phrases their ideas. For example, on pages 160 and 161, they state that "As distance transmission was facilitated through cables ... long distance broadcasting networks became a reality." However, they later say that "the emergence of cable in the USA reintroduced the narrowcast model." In addition, they state that Black Entertainment Television (received throughout the USA), and Telemundo (more globally received), are two examples of narrowcast television, even though the glossary defines narrowcast media as having "a limited range through which to reach audiences". I would hardly consider a globally received television network to have "limited range."

Another problem that I found was that there are no in text citations (aside from when a source is directly quoted). This would have been very useful in several instances, especially when I was unsure of the validity or accuracy of the information, or simply wished to further examine the subject. For example, on page 163, they state that "in Germany television was at first more frequently viewed collectively in public spaces. Television emerged during the era of Nazism as a nationalized industry that was used to forge a strong collective ideology. As such, it was a tool of mass persuasion". However, to the best of my knowledge (I may be wrong here...), television was not used in Germany until after World War II, and was only occasionally used (mostly during experiments with the new technology) throughout the world prior to and during the war.

Still, I found Sturken and Cartwright's book to be a rather good overview and introduction to visual culture and worth reading if you are interested in the subject, but do not know where to begin.