Journal Entries 5

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Practices of Looking

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Practices of Looking
An Introduction to Visual Culture

Third Edition

Marita Sturken
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY

Lisa Cartwright
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO

New York Oxford
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

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Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research,
scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and
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Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
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© 2018, 2009, 2001 by Oxford University Press

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You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Sturken, Marita, 1957- author. | Cartwright, Lisa, 1959- author.
Title: Practices of looking : an introduction to visual culture / Marita
   Sturken, New York University; Lisa Cartwright, University of California at San Diego.
Description: Third edition. | New York : Oxford University Press, 2017. |
   Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016052818 | ISBN 9780190265717
Subjects: LCSH: Art and society. | Culture. | Visual perception. | Visual
   communication. | Popular culture. | Communication and culture.
Classification: LCC N72.S6 S78 2017 | DDC 701/.03—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016052818

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed by LSC Communications, Inc.

Printed in the United States of America

http://www.oup.com/us/he

https://lccn.loc.gov/2016052818

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I v

acknowledgments ix

introduction 1

chapter 1 Images, Power, and Politics 13
Representation 18

Vision and Visuality 22

The Myth of Photographic Truth 24

Myth, Connotation, and the Meaning of Images 29

Semiotics and Signs 32

Images and Ideology 37

Image Icons 41

chapter 2 Viewers Make Meaning 51
Producers’ Intended Meanings 55

Aesthetics and Taste 60

Value, Collecting, and Institutional Critique 66

Reading Images as Ideological Subjects 74

Viewing Strategies 78

Appropriation and Reappropriation 81

chapter 3 Modernity: Spectatorship,
the Gaze, and Power 89

Modernity 89

Modernism 97

The Concept of the Modern Subject 100

Spectatorship and the Gaze 103

contents

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vi I C O N T E N T S

Power and the Surveillance Gaze 109

The Other 113

Gender and the Gaze 120

Gaming and the Gaze 132

chapter 4 Realism and Perspective:
From Renaissance Painting
to Digital Media 139

Types of Realism 142

Perspective 148

Perspective and the Body 153

The Camera Obscura 156

Challenges to Perspective 158

Perspective in Digital Media 166

chapter 5 Visual Technologies,
Reproduction, and the Copy 179

Visualization and Technology 179

Visual Technologies 185

The Reproduced Image and the Copy 189

Walter Benjamin and Mechanical Reproduction 191

The Politics of Reproducibility 195

Ownership and Copyright 198

Reproduction and the Digital Image 205

3D Reproduction and Simulation 212

chapter 6 Media in Everyday Life 219
The Media, Singular and Plural 219

Everyday Life 222

Mass Culture and Mass Media 223

Critiques of Mass Culture 227

Media Infrastructures 234

Media as Nation and Public Sphere 240

Democracy and Citizen Journalism 243

Global Media Events 247

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C O N T E N T S I vii

chapter 7 Brand Culture: The Images
and Spaces of Consumption 257

Brands as Image, Symbol, and Icon 260

The Spaces of Modern Consumerism 265

Brand Ideologies 272

Commodity Fetishism and the Rise of the
Knowing Consumer 278

Social Awareness and the Selling of Humanitarianism 283

Social Media, Consumer Data, and the Changing
Spaces of Consumption 288

DIY Culture, the Share Economy,
and New Entrepreneurism 293

chapter 8 Postmodernism: Irony,
Parody, and Pastiche 301

Postmodernity/Postmodernism 302

Simulation and the Politics of Postmodernity 307

Reflexivity and Distanced Knowing 311

Jaded Knowing and Irony 316

Remix and Parody 322

Pastiche 325

Postmodern Space, Architecture, and Design 330

chapter 9 Scientific Looking, Looking
at Science 337

Opening Up the Body to the Empirical Medical Gaze 340

Medicine as Spectacle: The Anatomical and Surgical Theater 343

Evidence, Classification, and Identification 349

Bodily Interiors and Biomedical Personhood 357

The Genetic and Digital Body 364

Visualizing Pharmaceuticals and Science Activism 370

chapter 10 The Global Flow of Visual Culture 379
The History of Global Image Reproduction 381

Concepts of Globalization 386

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viii I C O N T E N T S

The World Image 391

Global Television 397

The Global Flow of Film 399

Social Movements, Indigenous Media, and Visual Activism 402

The Global Museum and Contests of Culture 406

Refugees and Borders 415

glossary 425

credits 459

index 475

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Our heartfelt thanks to the many artists and designers whose work appears in this edition. The book is a tribute to you. We are grate-
ful as well to the many colleagues whose scholarly and critical input has deeply
informed this third edition of Practices of Looking. Major thanks to those who
offered frank advice and suggestions, and especially to the anonymous readers for
the press, listed below, who took the time to help us to improve this book based
on their experiences teaching with the previous edition. Thanks as well to our own
students, who have provided crucial feedback and steered us toward so many urgent
and compelling examples, issues, and theories along the way: this book is a tribute
to you as well.

We thank Lori Boatright for her continual support and for her sound counsel on
intellectual property rights. Dana Polan provided steady support to an extraordinary
degree; his intellectual guidance is vastly appreciated. We thank Rosalie Romero,
Nilo Goldfarb Cartwright, Inês Da Silva Beleza Barreiros, Daphne Magaro White,
Jake Stutz, Stephen Mandiberg, Kelli Moore, and Pawan Singh, all of whom con-
tributed in different ways and at different times to the ideas, choices, and writing
style adopted in this edition. Elizabeth Wolfson and Kavita Kulkarni provided very
important image research in early stages of this edition. We are very grateful to
Cathy Hannabach/Ideas on Fire for expertly editing our prose and helping to shape
the book’s argument.

At Oxford University Press, we have benefited immensely from the steadfast
support of Toni Magyar, Patrick Lynch, Mark Haynes, and other members of the
Oxford staff who worked with us during this process. We are especially grateful
to Paul Longo, who guided the book and all its details so well, and to Sandy Cook,
permissions manager extraordinaire, for her extensive and expert detective work in
image research. We learned so much from Sandy. Thanks to Allegra Howard for
picking up the book’s oversight late in the process, and to Cailen Swain for image
research early on. Thanks as well to Richard Johnson, Micheline Frederick, and the
copyediting and production team. Michele Laseau did excellent work on the layout
and cover design for this third edition. We are grateful to them and to Estudio Teddy
Cruz + Forman for granting us permission to use the dynamic graphics that grace
this edition’s cover.

acknowledgments

I ix

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x I A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

Jawad Ali Art Institute of California, Hollywood
Brian Carroll Berry College
Ross F. Collins North Dakota State University
Jacob Groshek Erasmus University, Rotterdam
Danny Hoffman University of Washington
Whitney Huber Columbia College, Chicago
Russell L. Kahn SUNY Institute of Technology
William H. son University of Maryland, College Park
Kent N. Lowry Texas Tech University
Julianne Newmark New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology
Sheryl E. Reiss University of Southern California
Beth Rhodes Art Institute of California, Los Angeles
Shane Tilton Ohio University, Lancaster
Emily E. West University of Massachusetts Amherst
Richard Yates University of Minnesota

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I 1

Introduction

how do you look? This question is loaded with possible meanings. How you look is, in one sense, how you appear. This is in part about how you con-
struct yourself for others to see, through practices of the self that involve grooming,
fashion, and social media. The selfie is a powerful symbol of this era in which not only
images but also imaging practices are used as primary modes of expression and com-
munication in everyday life. These days, you may be as likely to make images as you
are to view them. How you look to others, and whether and where you appear, has to
do with your access to such things as cameras, personal electronic devices and tech-
nologies, and social media. It is also contingent upon your place within larger struc-
tures of authority and in conventions of belief. Technical literacy as well as nationality,
class, religion, age, gender, and sexual identity may impact your right to appear, as
well as your ability to make and use images and imaging technologies. Nobody is
free to look as they please, not in any context. We all perform within (and against)
the conventions of cultural frameworks that include nation, religion, politics, family,
school, work, and health. These frameworks inform our taste and self- fashioning, and
they give rise to the conventions that shape how we look and where and how we
appear. How you look, even when deeply personal, is also always political.

We can see the politics of looking, erasure, and the conventions of looking in
this image. The Bahraini protesters pictured in Figure I.1 hold symbolic coffins with
photographs of victims of the government’s crackdown on the opposition. Some of
the photographs appear to be selfies, others family photographs, and still others of-
ficial portraits, perhaps workplace photographs. The faces of women are left blank
out of respect for religious and cultural prohibitions against representing women
in images. We might say that they are erased, but we may also note that they do
appear in the form of a generic graphic that signifies them through the presence of
the hijab.

How you look can also refer to the practices in which you engage to view, un-
derstand, appreciate, and make meaning of the world. To look, in this sense, is to
use your visual apparatus, which includes your eyes and hands, and also technolo-
gies like your glasses, your camera, your computer, and your phone, to engage the
world through sight and image. To look in this sense might be to glance, to peer,
to stare, to look up, or to look away. You may give little thought to what you see,

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2 I I N T R O D U C T I O N

or you may analyze it deeply. What you see is likely to appear
differently to others. Whereas some may see the hijab graphic
in the Bahraini protest photograph as a sign of women’s erasure,
others may see it as honoring women’s presence as activists in
this political context.

Practices of Looking is devoted to a critical understanding
and interpretation of the codes, meanings, rights, and limits that make images and
looking practices matter in our encounters in the world. Visual theorist Nicholas
Mirzoeff tells us that the right to look is not simply about seeing. He emphasizes
that looking is an exchange that can establish solidarity or social dominance and
which extends from the connection between self and other. Looking can be re-
stricted and controlled—it can be used to manipulate ideas and beliefs, but it can
also be used to affirm one’s own subjectivity in the face of a political system that
controls and regulates looking. In all of these senses, looking is implicated in the
dynamics of power, though never in straightforward or simple ways. This book
aims to provide an understanding of the specificity of looking practices as social
practices and the place of images in systems of social power. We hope that readers
will use this book to approach making images and studying the ways in which the
visual is negotiated in art practice, in communication and information systems, in
journalism, in activism, and in making, doing, and living in nature and the built

FIG. I.1
Bahraini protesters carry symbolic
coffins with pictures of victims
of the government crackdown on
opposition protests in the Shiite
village of Barbar, May 4, 2012

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I N T R O D U C T I O N I 3

environment. Practices of Looking supports the development of critical skills that
may inform your negotiation of life in a world where looking, images, and imaging
practices make a difference. Whether you are a maker of visual things and visual
tools, an interpreter and analyst of the visual world, or just someone who is curious
about the roles that looking plays in a world rife with screens, devices, images, and
displays, you engage with the visual. This book is designed to invite you to think
in critical ways about how that engagement unfolds in a world that is increasingly
made, or constituted, through visual mediation. Looking is regarded, throughout
this book, as a set of practices informed by a range of social arenas beyond art and
media per se. We engage in practices of looking, as consumers and producers, in
domains that range from the highly personal to the professional and the public,
from advertising, news media, television, movies, and video games to social media
and blogs. We negotiate the world through a multitude of ways of seeing, but
rarely do we stop and ask how we look.

We live in a world in which images proliferate in daily life. Consider pho-
tography. Whereas in the 1970s the home camera was taken out for something
special—those precious “Kodak moments” since the introduction of phone cam-
eras in 2000, taking photographs has become, for many, a daily habit. Indeed, many
hundreds of billions of photographs are taken each year. Each minute, tens of thou-
sands are uploaded to Instagram, and over 200,000 are posted to Facebook. In one
hour, more images are shared than were produced in all of the nineteenth century.

Photographs may be personal, but they are also always potentially public.
Through art, news, and social media, photographs can be a crucial force in the
visual negotiation of politics, the struggle for social justice, and the creation of
celebrity. Increasingly, people are resisting oppression through the use of photo-
graphs and videos marshaled as a form of witnessing, commentary, and protest, as
we can see in the use of photographs on protest placards.

Consider paintings and drawings. How is it different to see an original work
in a museum from viewing it at home, in a print copy that hangs on your wall, or
online, in a digital reproduction on your computer screen? How does it feel to be in
the presence of an original work you have long appreciated through reproductions
but never before seen in its original form? What does it mean to have your culture’s
original works destroyed or looted in warfare or as a political act of iconoclasm?
Meaning, whether in relationship to culture, politics, data, information, identity,
or emotion, is generated overwhelmingly through the circulation and exchange of
visual images and icons. The idea of the original still holds sway in an era of ram-
pant reproduction. Meaning is also generated through visuality, which we perform
in the socially and historically shaped field of exchange in which we negotiate the
world through our senses.

That we live in a world in which seeing and visuality predominate is not a nat-
ural or random fact. Visuality defines not only the social conditions of the visible
but also the workings of power in modern societies. Think about some of the ways

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4 I I N T R O D U C T I O N

in which seeing operates in
everyday dynamics of power.
Take the classroom, a space in
which many people look at one
person, the instructor, who is
assumed to have knowledge
and power. Consider govern-
ment buildings and the ways
in which their design features
lead you to notice some fea-

tures and restrict your access to others, maintaining national defense and gov-
ernment secrets while promoting a sense of their iconic stature. As a pervasive
condition of being, visuality engages us, and we engage it, through practices of
looking. These practices are learned and habitual, pervasive and fundamental. We
engage in them in ways that go well beyond our encounters with images.

We must understand not only what we see, but also what we cannot see,
what is made absent from sight. Take this work, Nightfall I, by the artist Ken
Gonzales-Day. It is a large-scale print depicting the simple lines of a leafless tree
framed against a jet black sky. The work is from the series Searching for California
Hang Trees, in which Gonzales-Day documents trees throughout the state of Cali-
fornia on which individuals, many of them Mexican, were hung by lynch mobs.
Gonzales-Day invokes absence on a series of levels: the body that was hung from
this tree is no longer evident. Its absence gestures to the larger absence in history
books of the fact that over 350 lynchings of young Mexican men took place in Califor-
nia, a history Gonzales-Day chronicles in his book Lynching in the West: 1850–1935
(Duke 2006). The artist uses the “empty” icon of the extant lynching tree to repre-
sent the very conditions of making a fact invisible. Whereas in the first image we
showed (the Bahraini protest march) those people erased in political killings are
made present through images, in this series the empty trees stand in for the people
killed. Visuality is about the conditions of negotiation through which something
becomes visible and under which it can be erased. How invisibility is “seen” and
made meaningful is an important question for visual studies.

Consider as well the visual dynamics of built environments—the ways in which
design, whether by choice or through making do with what is at hand, impacts the
meaning and use of a place. Consider the cultural conventions through which look-
ing creates connections and establishes power dynamics among people in a given

FIG. I.2
Ken Gonzales-Day, Nightfall I,
from Searching for California Hang
Trees, 2007–12 (LightJet print on
aluminum, 36 × 46″)

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I N T R O D U C T I O N I 5

place, such as a windowless government building surrounded by walls and pro-
tected by guards and surveillance cameras. We might ask who has the right to see
and who does not, and who is given the opportunity to exercise that right—when,
and under what conditions.

Of course, having the physical capacity to see is not a given. But whether
you are sighted, blind, or visually impaired, your social world is likely to be orga-
nized around an abundance of visual media and looking practices. Its navigation
may require adaptive optical devices, such as glasses, or navigational methods that
substitute for sight, such as echolocation. The practices we use to navigate and
communicate in this heavily visually constituted world are increasingly important
components of the ways in which we know, feel, and live as political and cultural
beings. We might say that our world is constituted, or made, through forms of visu-
ality, even as it is co-constituted through sound, touch, and smell along with sight.
Visual media are rarely only visual; they are usually engaged through sound, em-
bedded with text, and integrated with the physical experience of objects we touch.

Practices of Looking draws together a range of theories about vision and visu-
ality formulated by scholars in visual culture studies, art history, film and media
studies, communication, design, and a range of other fields. These theories help
us to rethink the history of the visual and better understand its role after the digital
turn. These writers, most of them working in or on the cusp of the era of digital
media and the Internet, have produced theories devoted to interpreting and ana-
lyzing visual culture.

Defining Culture
The study of visual culture derives many of its primary theoretical approaches from
cultural studies, an interdisciplinary field that first emerged in the mid-1960s in
Great Britain. One of the aims of cultural studies, at its foundation, was to provide
viewers, citizens, and consumers with the tools to gain a better understanding of
how we are produced as social subjects through the cultural practices that make up
our lives, including those involving everyday visual media such as television and
film. A shared premise of cultural studies’ focus on everyday culture was that the
media do not simply reflect opinion, taste, reality, and so on; rather, the media are
among the forms through which we are “made” as human subjects—as citizens,
as sexual beings, as political beings, and so on.

Culture was famously characterized by the British scholar Raymond Williams
as one of the most complex words in the English language. It is an elaborate con-
cept, the meanings and uses of which have changed over time among the many
critical theorists who have used it.1 Culture, Williams proposed in 1958, is funda-
mentally ordinary.2 To understand why this statement was so important, we must
recall that prior to the 1960s, the term culture was used to describe the “fine” arts

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6 I I N T R O D U C T I O N

and learned cultures. A “cultured” person engaged in the contemplation of clas-
sic works of art, literature, music, and philosophy. In keeping with this view, the
nineteenth-century British poet and social critic Matthew Arnold defined culture as
the “best which has been thought and said” in the world.3 Culture, in Arnold’s un-
derstanding, includes writing, art, and other forms of expression in instances that
conform to particular ideals of perfection. If one uses the term this way, a work by
Michelangelo or a composition by Mozart would represent the epitome of culture,
not because these are works of monetary value but because they would be believed
to embody a timeless ideal of aesthetic perfection that transcends class.

The apparent “perfection” of culture, according to the late twentieth-century
French sociological theory of Pierre Bourdieu, is in fact the product of training in
what counts as (quality) culture. Taste for particular forms of culture is cultivated
in people through exposure to and education about aesthetics.4 Bourdieu’s em-
phasis on culture as something acquired through training (enculturation) involved
making distinctions not only between works (masterworks and amateur paintings,
for example) but also between high and low forms (painting and television, for ex-
ample). As we explore in Chapter 2, “high versus low” was the traditional way of
framing discussions about aesthetic cultures through the first half of the twentieth
century, with high culture widely regarded as quality culture and low culture as its
debased counterpart. This division has become obsolete with the complex circula-
tions of contemporary cultural flow.

Williams drew on anthropology to propose that we embrace a broader definition
of culture as a “whole way of life of a social group or whole society,” meaning a broad
range of activities geared toward classifying and communicating symbolically within
a society. Popular music, print media, art, and literature are some of the classificatory
systems and symbolic means of expression through which humans organize their
lives. People make, view, and reuse these media in different ways and in different
places. The same can be said of sports, cooking, driving, relationships, and kinship.
Williams’s broader, more anthropological definition of culture leads us to notice ev-
eryday and pervasive activities, helping us to better understand mass and popular
forms of classification, expression, and communication as legitimate and meaningful
aspects of culture and not simply as debased or crude forms of expression.

Following from Williams, cultural studies scholars proposed that culture is not
so much a set of things (television shows or paintings, for example) as a set of pro-
cesses or practices through which individuals and groups produce, consume, and
make sense of things, including their own identities. Culture is produced through
complex networks of making, watching, talking, gesturing, looking, and acting—
networks through which meanings are negotiated among members of a society or
group. Objects such as images and media texts come into play in this network of
exchange as active agents. They draw us to look and to feel or speak in particular
ways. The British cultural theorist Stuart Hall stated: “It is the participants in a cul-
ture who give meaning to people, objects, and events. . . . It is by our use of things,

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I N T R O D U C T I O N I 7

and what we say, think and feel about them—how we represent them—that we
give them a meaning.”5 Following from Hall, we can say that just as we give mean-
ing to objects, so too do the objects we create, gaze on, and use for communication
or simply for pleasure give meaning to us. Things are active agents in the dynamic
interaction of social networks.

Our use of the term culture throughout this book emphasizes this under-
standing of culture as a fluid and interactive set of processes and practices. Culture
is complex and messy, and not a fixed set of ideals, tastes, practices, or aesthetics.
Meanings are produced not in the minds of individuals so much as through a pro-
cess of negotiation among practices within a particular culture. Visual culture is
made between individuals and the artifacts, images, technologies, and texts created
by themselves and others. Interpretations of the visual, which vie with one another,
shape a culture’s worldview. But visual culture, we emphasize, is grounded in
multimodal and multisensory cultural practices, and not solely in images and visu-
ality. We study visual culture and visuality in order to grasp their place in broader,
multisensory networks of meaning and experience.

The Study of Visual Culture
Visual culture emerged as a field of study in the 1980s, just as images and visual
screens were becoming increasingly prevalent in the production of media and modes
of information, communication, entertainment, and aesthetics. The study of visual
culture takes as one of its basic premises the idea that images from different social
realms are interconnected, with art, advertising, science, news media, and enter-
tainment interrelated and cross-influential. Many scholars no longer find viable the
traditional divisions in academia through which images in different realms (such as
art history, film studies, and communication) have been studied apart from other
categories of the visual. The cross-fertilization of categories is the result of historical
shifts, technological developments, and changing viewer practices. Through digital
technology, media are now merged in unprecedented ways. We may view art, read
news media, receive medical records, shop, and watch television and movies on
computers. The different industries and types of practice inherent in each form are
no longer as discrete as they once were.

Our title Practices of Looking gestures to this expanded social field of the
visual, emphasizing that to understand the images and imaging technologies with
which we engage every day, we must analyze the ways in which practices of look-
ing inform our ways of being in the world. Practices of Looking, in its first edition in
1999, took as its distant inspiration John Berger’s 1972 classic Ways of Seeing. The
book was a model for the examination of images across such disciplinary boundar-
ies as media studies and art history and it was influential in disparate social realms
such as art and advertising. …