Customer Reviews

Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Visual Culture is a newly explored process of evaluating all things that are visual and how they work in culture. This process can be traced back to John Berger's groundbreaking book in 1972 called Ways of Seeing. Taking Berger's theories further, the book, Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, written by Lisa Cartwright and Marita Sturken is a comprehensive introduction to visual culture and the means of which images are used and understood today. The well-organized text is a broad summary of critical approaches and methodologies for comprehending and investigating are photography, painting, film, and electronic media. Practices of looking covers a wide-range of topics that relate to the contemporary image-savvy culture and in order to detect the validness of the information presented by Cartwright and Sturken, it is necessary to research the sources they have provided and compare the information from the sources to the readings in Practices of Looking. After further investigation, I have concluded that the information that is present in Practice of Looking is a valid source for undergraduate comprehension of visual culture and the sources presented.

In chapter 6 of Practices of Looking, Sturken and Cartwright advance a very comprehensive analysis of the function of images in advertising. As a society that is dependent on and shaped by consumerism, we are constantly confronted with images in our daily lives. With this taken into respect, Sturken and Cartwright illustrate how advertising has come to shape our beliefs and practices in numerous facets of our daily lives such as lifestyle, self-image, self-improvement, and glamour. In addition, they have also provided the various ways in which we, as consumers, have interpreted and responded to the images and language of the advertising world. Drawing upon a broad range of sources, including philosophers, critics, cultural theorists, and other various media scholars, Sturken and Cartwright lay out an extremely well-crafted and organized analysis of their points.
I would recommend "Practices of Looking" to anyone interested in the discourses of anthropology, philosophy, and advertising. Sturken and Cartwright have done an exceptional job of condensing an abundence of complex research and criticism into a very engaging study that can be easily digested.

The global flow of visual culture is an ever growing and changing topic of discussion. Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright have presented a lengthy and informed discussion surrounding the topic in Chapter Nine of their book. The sources they have chosen to include are indeed credible and trustworthy. I think that they had an abundance of sources in their bibliography, and I would have liked to see them include more direct quotes and references within the chapter. Overall, I feel they provided the reader with an interesting and knowledgeable look into the world of global communication and visual culture.

It's good to have eyes that work reasonably well, and a "user's manual" such as this to learn how to use them.

The book Practices of Looking by Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright joins philosophy and the visual world by analyzing books and essays written by a variety of scholars. Sturken and Cartwright use their theories to analyze the basic concepts under the term "visual culture." In one chapter they look at how the spectator, the gaze, the subject and institution are the basic components in mass media. They present a distinction and relationship between address, the ideal viewer's reception, and the actual viewer's response. Sturken and Cartwright present spectatorship as a theory and provide clear and concise examples and evaluations of information that could take any person several years to get through. I have looked at a handful of these sources. Sturken and Cartwright do an adequate job combining and interpreting them, however if you are really interested in the concepts presented in the book, I would recommend reading the original sources; they are more in depth and engaging.

As an introduction to the subjuct of visual culture I found this text to be extremly inclusive. I looked specificly at chapter 3 of the book entitled, "Spectatorship, Power and Knowledge" in this chapter Sturken and Cartwright discuss the variables that effect the practices of looking. They do this by refrencing several influential figures who have touched on this subject, one of the most note worthy being feminist film critque Laura Mulvey, who wrote extensively on the gender differentials involved in spectatorship in the cinema from a psychoanalytic perspective. Also included in the chapter are the ways in which a capitalistic society sees an "uncivilized" society, and the power/knowledge struggles that accompany this view. From feminism to anthropology this chapter covers a great degree of possibilities all regarding the ways in which we see and the consequences/pleasures that derive from our practices of looking.

Postmodernism and Popular Culture
In Chapter seven of Practices of Looking, titled Postmodernism and Popular Culture, Sturken and Cartwright cover many different aspects of modernism. Modernism was characterized by radical styles that questioned traditions of representational painting. Piet Mondrian and Jackson Pollock are popular examples of artists that took part in the modernist movement. Constructivism is a style of modernism associated with works produced in the spirit of the Soviet revolution. Modernism is also expressed as reflexivity. Reflexivity is the practice of making viewers aware of the "content" of a cultural production.
The chapter mainly deals with postmodernism, hence the title. "Postmodernity is often described as the questioning of the master narratives of society" (p 251). Self-awareness one's own inevitable immersion in everyday and popular culture has led some post-modern artists to produce works, which reflexively examine their own position in relation to the artwork. Cindy Sherman is an example of an artist that inserts herself into a photograph commenting on both sides of the camera. Reflexivity is not only a feature of postmodern art; it has become a central aspect of postmodern style in popular culture and advertising. In the 1990's artists began adopting a more direct approach to the transformation of image and/as identity. The world of images today consists of a huge variety of remakes, copies, and reproductions. Intertextuality and ironic humor began to become a part of advertising campaigns. French philosopher Jean Baudrillard has described the twentieth century as a period which images became more real. We have passed from an era in which reproduction and representation were the most crucial aspects of how an image works.
Sturken and Cartwright did a wonderful job on listing examples and giving credit where it belongs. They are also careful to include examples that modern student can relate to, for example when trying to define metacommunication as a strategy they picture a Kenneth Cole ad with a hand written memo, which mocked typical fashion ads. The ad established metacommunication by allowing the viewer to feel that Kenneth Cole is directly speaking to them. Sturken and Cartwright also properly include examples in the areas that may possibly be confusing for example, they ask the question "Is postmodernism a period, a style or set of styles, an ethos, a set of sensibilities, or a policies of cultural experience and production in which style and image predominate?" (P238) Their simple answer was, a little of each. There are many more complicated examples in this chapter and the rest of the chapter in Practices of Looking.
Chapter seven covers many different concepts that must have been hard to research. Sturken and Cartwright list an upwards of twenty further readings and additional notes on their sources. The chapter includes pictures to go along with all the descriptions talked about in the readings. For a visual culture book many pictures are needed to further explain what they are talking about. The pictures of the advertisements help the most when they define new concepts with a picture that perfectly describe what they are talking about. In my opinion Sturken and Cartwright did a very good job finding relevant information and explaining it so most people could understand.