- Paperback: 396 pages
- Publisher: OUP Oxford (21 Dec 2000)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0198742711
- ISBN-13: 978-0198742715
- Product Dimensions: 22.6 x 15.2 x 1.8 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 228,674 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
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Product Description
Book Description
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Product Description
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.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
28 of 28 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This book is a splendid introduction to theories about visual culture. It opens up the sociological / psychodynamic / anthropological theories that exist about the visual media to laymen. Another good thing is that they do not focus on high culture visual media, but also on film, television, advertising, etc. This is what makes the book valuable to people who are specialized in neighbouring fields and who wish to know more about visual media (for instance, marketeers, perception psychologists, therapists, people studying politics, etc.). On every topic the background literature is made accessible by good references and a short introduction to these references. This is really helpful! For instance, i always wanted to know more about Barthes theorizing about myths, and how that applies to advertising, with this book i have a good introduction, but also a good guide that tells me how to find the relevant and more up to date literature on this topic.
23 of 23 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This book is easy going introductory reading for undergraduate courses on the subject. It's relatively short, has lots of pictures and photos and is mostly about advertising, tv, and popular culture. It makes a nice change from weighty pompous academic essays and it's engaging and intelligent.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
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28 reviews
26 of 29 people found the following review helpful
A Very Useful Text for Teaching
9 Jan 2002
Format: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
Review of Chapter Nine
30 Sep 2003
Format: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.
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
Good introduction to visual culture, but with a few problems
25 April 2003
Format: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.
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