Product Description

Visual culture is central to how we communicate. Our lives are dominated by images and by visual technologies that allow for the local and global circulation of ideas, information, and politics. In this increasingly visual world, how can we best decipher and understand the many ways that our everyday lives are organized around looking practices and the many images we encounter each day? Now in a new edition, Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture provides a comprehensive and engaging overview of how we understand a wide array of visual media and how we use images to express ourselves, to communicate, to play, and to learn. Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright--two leading scholars in the emergent and dynamic field of visual culture and communication--examine the diverse range of approaches to visual analysis and lead students through key theories and concepts.

Using clear, accessible language, vivid examples, and more than 250 full-color illustrations, the authors both explain and apply theory as they discuss how we see paintings, prints, photographs, film, television, video, advertisements, the news, the Internet, digital media, and visualization techniques in medicine and science. This truly interdisciplinary text bridges art history, film, media, and cultural studies to investigate how images carry meaning within and between different cultural arenas in everyday life, from art and commerce to science and the law. Sturken and Cartwright analyze images in relation to a wide spectrum of cultural and representational issues (desire, power, the gaze, bodies, sexuality, and ethnicity) and methodologies (semiotics, Marxism, psychoanalysis, feminism, and postcolonial theory).

Thoroughly updated to incorporate cutting-edge theoretical research, the second edition examines the following new topics: the surge of new media technologies; the impact of globalization on the flow of information and media form and content; and how nationalism and security concerns have changed our looking practices in the aftermath of 9/11. Challenging yet accessible, Practices of Looking is ideal for courses across a range of disciplines, including media and film studies, communications, art history, and photography.

Beautifully designed and now in a larger format and in full color throughout, Practices of Looking is an invaluable guide to understanding the complexities, contradictions, and pleasures of the visual world.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8106 in Books
• Published on: 2009-01-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 496 pages

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 Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University.

Lisa Cartwright is Professor of Communication and Science Studies at the University of California at San Diego.

Customer Reviews

A Very Useful Text for Teaching
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.

Review of Chapter Nine
As a class assignment, I closely studied chapter nine of Practices of Looking, 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.

Practices of Looking: Specificly Chapter One
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.