Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture

I'm like most college students, we like to procrastinate. I needed this book fast for a project, ordered rush delivery. Arrived next day in perfect condition. No complaints. I got a good grade too!

This is an excellent book for anyone interested in media studies. The language is simple and articulate. The authors provide plenty of visual evidence in each chapter. If you enjoy reading about popular culture, even advertising strategies- this is the book for you.

I read and researched the first chapter of Practices of Looking. I looked up some of the authors and philosophers mentioned in this chapter. Roland Barthes, John Berger, Charles Peirce, and Allan Sekula. Each author had an idea about how and why we interpreted images. All of these people put out good information about images in our culture. However, their writing is not very easy to understand. Sturken and Cartwright are like their translators. If I were to read and understand the writings of these people on my own I would have learned nothing. However, reading about them through Practices of Looking allowed me to understand much more. Sturken and Cartwright quote the philosophers and then explain what they meant, and the context of what they wrote. They also used art and other well-known images to get the point across about the importance of images in our culture and what they do for our everyday lives. I learned a great deal form this chapter, and book, and I will continue to use it as a reference in the future.

Postmodernism and Popular Culture In Chapter seven of Practices of Looking, titled Postmodernism and Popular Culture, Sturken and Cartwright cover many different aspects of modernism. Modernism was characterized by radical styles that questioned traditions of representational painting. Piet Mondrian and Jackson Pollock are popular examples of artists that took part in the modernist movement. Constructivism is a style of modernism associated with works produced in the spirit of the Soviet revolution. Modernism is also expressed as reflexivity. Reflexivity is the practice of making viewers aware of the "content" of a cultural production. The chapter mainly deals with postmodernism, hence the title. "Postmodernity is often described as the questioning of the master narratives of society" (p 251). Self-awareness one's own inevitable immersion in everyday and popular culture has led some post-modern artists to produce works, which reflexively examine their own position in relation to the artwork. Cindy Sherman is an example of an artist that inserts herself into a photograph commenting on both sides of the camera. Reflexivity is not only a feature of postmodern art; it has become a central aspect of postmodern style in popular culture and advertising. In the 1990's artists began adopting a more direct approach to the transformation of image and/as identity. The world of images today consists of a huge variety of remakes, copies, and reproductions. Intertextuality and ironic humor began to become a part of advertising campaigns. French philosopher Jean Baudrillard has described the twentieth century as a period which images became more real. We have passed from an era in which reproduction and representation were the most crucial aspects of how an image works. Sturken and Cartwright did a wonderful job on listing examples and giving credit where it belongs. They are also careful to include examples that modern student can relate to, for example when trying to define metacommunication as a strategy they picture a Kenneth Cole ad with a hand written memo, which mocked typical fashion ads. The ad established metacommunication by allowing the viewer to feel that Kenneth Cole is directly speaking to them. Sturken and Cartwright also properly include examples in the areas that may possibly be confusing for example, they ask the question "Is postmodernism a period, a style or set of styles, an ethos, a set of sensibilities, or a policies of cultural experience and production in which style and image predominate?" (P238) Their simple answer was, a little of each. There are many more complicated examples in this chapter and the rest of the chapter in Practices of Looking. Chapter seven covers many different concepts that must have been hard to research. Sturken and Cartwright list an upwards of twenty further readings and additional notes on their sources. The chapter includes pictures to go along with all the descriptions talked about in the

This is a well-organized text for teaching introductory undergraduate courses in visual culture, media studies or art history. I used it in a course I taught last semester and the students seemed to get a lot out of it. It provides a broad overview of critical approaches and methodologies for understanding and analyzing art, photography, painting, film and electronic media. One of its strengths is the way it facilitates thinking about images across disciplines and cultural realms from art to popular culture and from the fields of law to science and medicine. The book has many good illustrations that support the concepts discussed.