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Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide.

Print Price: $149.99

Format:
Paperback
504 pp.
8.5" x 11"

ISBN-13:
9780190265717

Copyright Year:
2018

Imprint: OUP US


Practices of Looking

An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright

This text provides an engaging overview of how we understand a wide array of visual media and how we use images to express ourselves, communicate, play, and learn. Using vivid examples and accessible language, the book explains the meanings of images from fine art, popular film and television, advertising, digital media, and images from the sciences, law, and medicine.

Readership : Suitable for courses in visual culture, design, communication, media studies, and art history.

Reviews

  • "The greatest strength of Practices of Looking is its thorough treatment of the conceptual and material landscape of postmodern visual culture, and this definitely distinguishes it from similar textbooks I've seen."
    --Kent N. Lowery, Texas Tech University

  • "Practices of Looking is a great and valuable textbook for teaching a broad range of critical and theoretical approaches in modern and contemporary visual practices and visual fields."
    --Whitney Huber, Columbia College, Chicago

  • "Practices of Looking's ambitions are unparalleled and it's clear that the writers are deeply engaged with the social, psychological and economic consequences of the ways in which images influence how we see ourselves and the world around us."
    --Jawad Ali, Art Institute of California, Hollywood

  • "The greatest strength of Practices of Looking is its relentless drive to instill a perspective of critical awareness in the reader. This book contributes greatly to promoting and enstilling the type of visual literacy much needed in our contemporary mass mediated society both now and undoubtedly in the foreseeable future."
    --William H. Lawson, University of Maryland, College Park

Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction

1. Images, Power, and Politics
Representation
Vision and Visuality
The Myth of Photographic Truth
Myth, Connotation, and the Meaning of Images
Semiotics and Signs
Images and Ideology
Image Icons
2. Viewers Make Meaning
Producers' Intended Meanings
Aesthetics and Taste
Value, Collecting, and Institutional Critique
Reading Images as Ideological Subjects
Viewing Strategies
Appropriation and Re-Appropriation
3. Modernity: Spectatorship, the Gaze, and Power
Modernity
Modernism
The Concept of the Modern Subject
Spectatorship and the Gaze
Power and the Surveillance Gaze
The Other
Gender and the Gaze
Gaming and the Gaze
4. Realism and Perspective: From Renaissance Painting to Digital Media
Perspective
Perspective and the Body
The Camera Obscura
Challenges to Perspective
Perspective in Digital Media
5. Visual Technologies, Reproduction, and the Copy
Visualization and Technology
Visual Technologies
The Reproduced Image and the Copy
Walter Benjamin and Mechanical Reproduction
The Politics of Reproducibility
Ownership and Copyright
Reproduction and the Digital Image
3D Reproduction and Simulation
6. Media in Everyday Life
The Media, Singular and Plural
Everyday Life
Mass Culture and Mass Media
Critiques of Mass Culture
Media Infrastructures
Media as Nation and Public Sphere
Democracy and Citizen Journalism
Global Media Events
7. Brand Culture: The Images and Spaces of Consumption
The Rise of Brands as Image, Symbol, and Icon
The Spaces of Modern Consumerism
Brands in Consumer Society
Social Awareness and the Selling of Humanitarianism
Social Media, Consumer Data, and the Changing Spaces of Consumption
DIY Culture and the Share Economy, and New Entrepreneurism
8. Postmodernism: Irony, Parody, and Pastiche
Postmodernity/Postmodernism
Simulation and the Politics of Postmodernity
Reflexivity and Distanced Knowing
Jaded Knowing and Irony
Remix and Parody
Pastiche
Postmodern Space, Architecture, and Design
9. Scientific Looking, Looking at Science
Opening Up the Body to the Empirical Medical Gaze
Medicine as Spectacle: The Anatomical and Surgical
Theater
Evidence, Classification, and Identification
Bodily Interiors and Biomedical Personhood
The Genetic and Digital Body
Visualizing Pharmaceuticals and Science Activism
10. The Global Flow of Visual Culture
The History of Global Image Reproduction
Concepts of Globalization
The World Image
Global Television
The Global Flow of Film
Social Movements, Indigenous Media, and Visual Activism
The Global Museum and Contests of Culture
Refugees and Borders
Glossary
Credits
Index

E-Book ISBN 9780190265755

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.

Making Sense in the Social Sciences - Margot Northey, Lorne Tepperman and Patrizia Albanese
Social Media - Ashlee Humphreys
Understanding Media Industries - Timothy Havens and Amanda Lotz

Special Features

  • Clear and comprehensive introduction to the study of visual culture and communication.
  • Balances theory with real-world examples tied to major theoretical approaches from the field.
  • Unparalleled foundation in critical, cultural paradigms including an extensive glossary of essential terms, movements, people, theories, and techniques.
  • Striking full-colour interior design features 321 images--225 of which are new--offering students an array of vibrant visual examples.
New to this Edition
  • Up-to-date coverage of key topics, including photographic meaning and strategy; the visual image consumer/maker/transmitter; work by queer and black women; video game perspectives; brand culture, social media marketing, humanitarian campaigns, and the sharing economy; postmodern design and architecture and how to rethink simulation.
  • Discussions on new areas of interest, including computer screens and perspective versus perspective in painting; early representations of medicine and biometrics in cultures of surveillance; the economic downturn of 2008, new social movements, environmental issues, and the context for art, architecture, film, and media cultures.
  • New focus on the strategies used to introduce marginal voices throughout media and industry.