Practices of Looking

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.

Instructor's manual availalbe online.

(Oxford)

Bli först med att recensera och betygsätt boken Practices of Looking - du kan vinna 200 kr varje månad i tävlingen "Månadens recension".

CHAPTER 1: IMAGES, POWER, AND POLITICS; Representation; The Myth of Photographic Truth; Images and Ideology; How We Negotiate the Meaning of Images; The Value of Images; Image Icons; CHAPTER 2: VIEWERS MAKE MEANING; Producers' Intended Meanings; Aesthetics and Taste; Collecting, Display, and Institutional Critique; Reading Images as Ideological Subjects; Encoding and Decoding; Reception and the Audience; Appropriation and Cultural Production; Re-appropriation and Counter-Bricolage; CHAPTER 3: MODERNITY: SPECTATORSHIP, POWER, AND KNOWLEDGE; The Subject in Modernity; Spectatorship; Discourse and Power; The Gaze and the Other; The Gaze in Psychoanalysis; Gender and the Gaze; Changing Concepts of the Gaze; CHAPTER 4: REALISM AND PERSPECTIVE: FROM RENAISSANCE PAINTING TO DIGITAL MEDIA; Visual Codes and Historical Meaning; Questions of Realism; The History of Perspective; Perspective and the Body; The Camera Obscura; Challenges to Perspective; Perspective in Digital Media; CHAPTER 5: VISUAL TECHNOLOGIES, IMAGE REPRODUCTION, AND THE COPY; Visual Technologies; Motion and Sequence; Image Reproduction: The Copy; Walter Benjamin and Mechanical Reproduction; The Politics of Reproducibility; Copies, Ownership, and Copyright; Reproduction and the Digital Image; CHAPTER 6: MEDIA IN EVERYDAY LIFE; The Masses and Mass Media; Media Forms; Broadcast, Narrowcast, and Webcast Media; The History of Mass Media Critiques; Media and Democratic Potential; Media and the Public Sphere; National and Global Media Events; Contemporary Media and Image Flows; CHAPTER 7: ADVERTISING, CONSUMER CULTURES, AND DESIRE; Consumer Societies; Envy, Desire, and Belonging; Commodity Culture and Commodity Fetishism; Brands and Their Meanings; The Marketing of Coolness; Anti-ads and Culture Jamming; CHAPTER 8: POSTMODERNISM, INDIE MEDIA, AND POPULAR CULTURE; Postmodernism and its Visual Cultures; Addressing the Postmodern Subject; Reflexivity and Postmodern Identity; Pastiche, Parody, and the Remake; Indie Media and Postmodern Approaches to the Market; Postmodern Space, Geography, and the Built Environment; CHAPTER 9: SCIENTIFIC LOOKING, LOOKING AT SCIENCE; The Theater of Science; Images as Evidence: Cataloguing the Body; Imaging the Body's Interior: Biomedical Personhood; Vision and Truth; Imaging Genetics; The Digital Body; Visualizing Pharmaceuticals; CHAPTER 10: THE GLOBAL FLOW OF VISUAL CULTURE; The Global Subject and the Global Gaze; Cultural Imperialism; Global Branding; Concepts of Globalization; Visuality and Global Media Flow; Indigenous and Diasporic Media; Borders and Franchises: Art and the Global; Glossary; Acknowledgments; Illustration

(Oxford)