Practices of Looking An Introduction to Visual Culture

by Sturken, Marita; Cartwright, Lisa

• ISBN13: 9780197627150
• ISBN10: 0197627153
• Edition: 4th
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2025-01-10
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

An engaging introduction to the study of visual culture, Practices of Looking bridges visual, communication, media, and cultural studies to investigate how images and the activity of looking carry meaning within and between different arenas in everyday life. The fourth edition has been updated to represent the contemporary visual cultural landscape and includes topics like the increasingly rapid global circulation of media, the rise of design and DIY cultures, digital media art and activism, and challenges to photojournalism and news media. Engaging and accessible, Practices of Looking is ideal for courses across a range of disciplines.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 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

Chapter 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

Chapter 3 Modernity: Spectatorship, the Gaze, and Power
Modernity and the Modern City
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

Chapter 4 Realism and Perspective:
From Renaissance Painting to Digital Media
Types of Realism
Perspective
Perspective and the Body
The Camera Obscura
Challenges to Perspective
Perspective in Digital Media

Chapter 5 Visual Technologies:
Image Reproduction, Generation, 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

Chapter 6 Media Culture
Media, Singular and Plural
Propaganda and the Media Environment
Popular Culture Studies
Media Geographies
Media Infrastructures
Media as Nation and Public Sphere
Citizen Journalism
Global Media Events

Chapter 7 Brand Culture: Visual Culture and
the Spaces of Consumption
Consumer Societies and the Spaces of
Modern Consumerism
Brands as Image, Symbol, and Icon
Brand Ideologies and Commodity Fetishism
The Knowing Consumer
Selling Social Awareness

Chapter 8 The Postmodernism Condition and
Twenty-First Futurisms
The Postmodern Condition
Poststructuralism in the Wake of the Holocaust
Atomic Media
Postmodern Architecture in Social Context
Kitsch and the Vernacular
Futurisms and Simulation
Reflexivity And Distanced Knowing
Appropriation and Postmodern Subjectivity
Remix, Parody, and Pastiche

Chapter 9 Visual Cultures of Data and Science
Numbers and Structures of Feeling
Modern Western Science and the Data Body
Evidence, Classification, and Normative Science
Bodily Interiors and Biomedical Personhood
Biopower and the Quantified Self
The Genetic and Digital Body
Data in the Global Pandemic
The Infodemic: Data in the Service of Propaganda
The Sensory Body, the Cyborg, and Disability

Chapter 10 The World Image and Globalization
Being in the World
The Universal Image: A Star is Born
The World Image
Geolocation
The Digital Twin and the Point Cloud
The World Ocean
The Cloud Image
Concepts of Globalization
Social Movements and Visual Activism
The Global Museum
Refugees and Borders

Glossary
Credits
Index