Practices of looking : an introduction to visual culture / Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Sturken, Marita, 1957-

Contributor:

Cartwright, Lisa, 1959-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Visual sociology.

Popular culture.

Physical Description:

385 pages : :illustrations ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, [2001]

Summary:

This comprehensive and engaging introduction to visual culture explores the ways we use and understand images. It looks at painting, photography, film, television, and new media across the realms of art, advertising, news, science, and law. Authors Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright present the diverse range of approaches to visual analysis that have emerged in the last few decades, and lead the reader through the key theories of visual culture in an accessible and highly readable approach.

Including over 180 images, this truly interdisciplinary and beautifully designed book aims to be a comprehensive introduction for anyone interested in images, and the key text for courses across a range of disciplines including media and film studies, art history, photography, and communication.

Contents:

1 Practices of Looking: Images, Power, and Politics 10

Representation 12

The myth of photographic truth 16

Images and ideology 21

How we negotiate the meaning of images 25

The value of images 31

Image icons 36

2 Viewers Make Meaning 45

Producers' intended meanings 45

Aesthetics and taste 48

Reading images as ideological subjects 50

Encoding and decoding 56

Appropriation and oppositional readings 58

Re-appropriations and counter-bricolage 68

3 Spectatorship, Power, and Knowledge 72

Psychoanalysis and the image spectator 72

The gaze 76

Changing concepts of the gaze 82

Discourse, the gaze, and the other 93

Power/knowledge and panopticism 96

The gaze and the exotic 100

4 Reproduction and Visual Technologies 109

Realism and the history of perspective 111

Realism and visual technologies 115

The reproduction of images 121

Reproduced images as politics 130

Visual technologies and phenomenology 134

The digital image 138

Virtual space and interactive images 144

5 The Mass Media and the Public Sphere 151

Critiques of the mass media 161

The mass media and democratic potential 168

Television and the question of sponsorship 172

Media and the public sphere 177

New media cultures 183

6 Consumer Culture and the Manufacturing of Desire 189

Consumer society 191

Commodity culture and commodity fetishism 198

Addressing the consumer 203

Images and text 209

Envy, desire, and glamour 212

Belonging and difference 218

Bricolage and counter-bricolage 222

The brand 227

Anti-ad practices 231

7 Postmodernism and Popular Culture 237

Modernism 240

Postmodernism 251

Reflexivity 254

The copy, pastiche, and institutional critique 259

Popular culture: parody and reflexivity 264

Addressing the postmodern consumer 270

8 Scientific Looking, Looking at Science 279

Images as evidence 280

Scientific looking 286

Images in biomedicine: sonograms and fetal personhood 291

Scientific images as advocacy and politics 294

Vision and truth 298

Genetics and the digital body 300

Popular science 308

9 The Global Flow of Visual Culture 315

Television flow: from the local to the global 318

The critique of cultural imperialism 322

Markets of the Third World 324

Alternative circulations: hybrid and diasporic images 327

The Internet: global village or multinational corporate marketplace? 333

The World Wide Web as private and public sphere 338

The challenge of the Internet to privacy, censorship, and free speech 342

The place of the visual in the new millennium 344.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0198742711

OCLC:

45806460