Author(s): Marita Sturken; Lisa Cartwright

Art

Ideal for students studying visual culture for the first time, Practices of Looking, Second Edition, explores the ways we use and understand images. Truly interdisciplinary, this comprehensive and engaging introduction can be used in courses across a range of disciplines including media andfilm studies, communications, art history, and photography. Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright cover recent approaches to visual analysis and lead students through key theories on visual culture, providing explanations of the fundamentals of these theories and presenting visual examples of how theyfunction. Using more than 180 illustrations, they examine how images - paintings, prints, photographs, film, television, video, advertisements, news images, the Internet, digital images, and images from science - gain meaning in different cultural arenas, from art and commerce to science and thelaw. They also consider how these images travel globally and in distinct cultures, and how they are an integral aspect of our lives. The 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). Central topics 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 are explained in depth.In this second edition, Sturken and Cartwright include new information on the concept of nationalism and security since 9/ll, the explosion of new media technologies, and the impact of globalization on information flows and media form and content. They also update the book's theoretical foundation,bringing in new ideas about image ethics (particularly in the digital domain) and acknowledging the "crisis in theory" around the marxism-psychoanalysis-semiotics triad.