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Lisa Cartwright and Marita Sturken

In this chapter we approach visual culture pedagogy through an account of our academic training and work histories as they informed our book Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture in its three very different editions (2001, 2008, 2018). Our experience was unusually broad, spanning art and media practice, cultural studies, critical theory, cultural history, and media activism. Through this mixed approach we helped to introduce a range of images and image‐making cultures and technologies, beyond art and film, to the then nascent visual culture field. In the account we give here of that process we aim to show how, in the 1990s, visual culture was not just a new direction in art history or a merger between art history and film studies. Rather the field’s emergence was also motivated by political movements and their multimodal forms of practice, as well as by a commitment to recognizing and studying images and imaging technologies at work in a host of institutions and practices beyond fine art, popular media, and art cinema during a period of extraordinary technological transformation around the visual.

Our initial project, launched in the mid‐1990s, was to respond to the complex and messy ways in which the visual, in all of its historicity, was becoming integral to all aspects of everyday life. We hoped to draw together a combined yet flexible set of theories and methods through which readers might approach and interpret the lived and practiced relationship among visual modalities in social interaction across a spectrum of contexts—including fine art, cinema, television, advertising, and emergent new media. The visual took on new urgency in the 1990s, the decade during which visual and time‐based graphic systems became ubiquitous in personal computing and in art, science, and medicine. The book was launched during a global health crisis (the ongoing AIDS pandemic) and on the cusp of the release of specialized and consumer‐accessible digital visual and time‐based computer imaging and graphics systems, image archive digitization tools, mobile phone cameras, and a host of other visual technologies. These changes impacted not only the arts and consumer cultures but also education, medicine, science, and law, fields through which imaging and visuality were becoming more central to the practice of everyday life as well as to systems of knowledge and power.

We were initially inspired by John Berger’s (1972) Ways of Seeing, a classic that, despite its continued popularity, by the mid‐1990s had fallen out of sync with the times. We wanted to write a short work, evocative and readable, that would update Berger’s seemingly timeless text. We aimed to expand its focus from photography and fine art not only to film and popular media but also to media’s new uses in the nascent digital era—uses that went beyond art and popular culture. The cultural context of the 1990s seemed to demand such a widening of scope. AIDS activism had politicized art practice and critical theory in ways that made clear the role of art and the media, and of art and media theory, in contemporary queer, feminist, and radical movement politics. And they also made clear the extent to which imaging was becoming increasingly indispensable not only to voicing rights, but also to the critical interrogation and remaking of knowledge discourses and treatment practices. Public health media and biomedical research, information, and knowledge were increasingly being produced via visual and audiovisual formats. In addition, critical communication studies, with its emphasis on information systems and popular media channels and flows, became conversant with art theory at this very time, in part to theorize this new shift toward visual knowledge and practice in the public sphere and in institutional contexts.

Volume 43 of October, a 1987 issue edited by Douglas Crimp and titled AIDS: Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism, was a watershed in this regard. The arts journal included work by Paula A. Treichler, a feminist linguistics and communication studies scholar whose analysis deftly spanned advocacy for and theory of activist video art, popular media critique, and interpretation of knowledge production in biomedical research and public health. By the mid‐1990s, video and digital media forms, which were new at the time, had been introduced as objects of study not only in art history but also in communication studies. Queer and feminist visual artists and theorists were taking on media cultures and technoscience. Yet there was not yet a cohesive primer through which to introduce to readers the tactical alliances and intersections available and enlisted into action across those fields and across the divide between criticism or theory on the one hand and research‐based art practice and activism on the other. We hoped to speak to artists, activists, and theorists as well as to scholars by bridging these areas with the help of a mix of theories and methods that would bring out the stakes of working on the visual in a cohesive yet syncretic way.

In research‐based art practice during this time, drawing, photography, film, media, and performance were being used in ways that moved beyond the closed frameworks of structuralism and formalism. This was evident in the work of the “pictures generation” artists and new narrative filmmakers, as well as in a number of other 1990s approaches to practice that incorporated criticism and theory. This suggested to us the need for a rethinking of the mix of critical theories that could support this poststructuralist movement away from dogmatic adherence to form. At the same time, the dogmatism of poststructural deconstructive and psychoanalytic critical theory of the 1980s and early 1990s came into question as theorists took stock of the unintended impact of totalizing theories of power and knowledge. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick noted, totalizing criticism made it harder rather than easier to account for local and contingent relationships among knowledge, experience, and its forms of explanation, exchange, interpretation, representation, criticism, and experience (Sedgwick 2002, 123–151). Picture‐generation appropriation politics reigned as art practitioners such as Barbara Kruger took up proto‐social media forms to do theory by other means. The redirecting of modernist practice and theory toward postmodernist tactics such as irony, parody, nostalgia, and appropriation was a turn we wanted to contextualize historically and to examine in ways that remained open to tactical experimentation with older modernist and formalist methods and theories, which we also aimed to introduce in the book. Our goal was not so much to unify and streamline theory around the “now” of postmodern formations as it was to capture this mix in all its messy yet productive contradictions and future possibilities, which required accounting for the potentiality and failures of theory in modernity.

In retrospect, this description of our approaches can perhaps make our initial foray sound more systematic than it was. In fact our aim was largely shaped by the work we had done as practitioners and early career scholars, and were currently doing—in part through writing and curating and, importantly, through what we were teaching and wanted to teach in our classes: the kinds of images and practices that we wanted to interpret with our students, and the kinds of connections across social arenas and domains of practice that we wanted our students to make. Our particular institutional placements demanded a kind of bridging work and explanatory labor that was somewhat unusual in its scope, for that time. Focus on everyday image cultures or on biomedical imaging practice was not common in film and media studies or in art history of the era. Teaching across history/theory and practice was relatively new. American cultural studies was largely organized around the popular. In conceptualizing Practices of Looking, we hoped to account for an emergent field that crossed art history, film studies, media studies, cultural studies, and critical, research‐based, and activist practice‐based art and media and to provide a resource, on the cusp of the digital turn, that would offer a flexible set of tactics for approaching the visual—without mandating particular interpretations or a de rigueur set of methods. We were aiming for flexible means of theorization that would work across forms. Whereas the visual culture methods emerging around the new art history emphasized semiotics, film studies was forwarding psychoanalytic and narrative interpretive methods in parallel conversations. Yet few options were in place if one wanted to make sense of the differences or to work across these discourses in cultures of convergence—an activity that includes the traditional academic disciplines and not just media formats.

While we were writing the first edition of our book, the historical images under discussion in art and photography history classes were not yet digitized, and not yet available on the Internet or in searchable databases. Easy access to digital reproduction through licensing—at a cost, from private image brokers, and in some cases for free, from public institutional collections—was still just over the horizon. Imaging and image reproduction were themselves becoming more pervasive and more flexible sets of modalities. This was the case not only in art, where slide library digitization would soon transform both practice and pedagogy, but also in film and video. In the pre‐YouTube era before 2005, audiovisual media were viewable either through film prints or on VHS, but never online. Practically, then, the convergence of slides, films, and video circulation and display through computing after 2000 made teaching across the arts and in various media seem fluid and natural. This was a transformation that demanded convergence among an array of histories and theories as well, in order to account for both the phenomenology of experience and the economic and sociopolitical realities of image access, ownership, taste, and markets on a global scale. Importantly, social media were not yet introduced and the mobile phone camera was not yet an entity when our first edition was released. Meanwhile, fields such as medicine and law, disciplines previously dominated by text and the word, were engaging with images as routine parts of everyday research, treatment, service, and teaching. This shift required theorization among those of us with expertise in image and media history and theory. We were keen to adapt the theories at hand to these underconsidered areas of visual culture.

A bit of background on our academic training may help to explain what we brought to the table in this work when we set out to write this book in the mid‐1990s. We both came from backgrounds in art practice—Marita in photography and video, Lisa in sculpture and film. At the time when we began our collaboration, Lisa was teaching in a new PhD program that straddled art history and an English‐ and comparative literature‐based film studies program at the University of Rochester. Originally called Comparative Studies, the program had been renamed Visual and Cultural Studies in 1991, to reflect allegiance to the British cultural studies tradition (the Birmingham‐trained sociologist of art Janet Wolff had been hired to direct the program) while maintaining the visual studies concept that circulated at the time in “the new art history” (Harris 2001, Jõekalda 2013). This orientation was reflected in the work of comparative literature scholar Mieke Bal and art historian Michael Ann Holly, who remained on the Rochester faculty after Norman Bryson’s departure for Harvard and the untimely death of art critic and queer theorist Craig Owens in 1990—the year in which Lisa joined the faculty to teach in the film studies and global health majors. Douglas Crimp had been hired to teach in the program not only as an art historian but also as a cultural theorist of activism and sexuality, on the basis of his groundbreaking contributions to activism and theory around HIV/AIDS. Thus theory and cultural studies of sexuality and health were foundational to visual culture as it was taught at Rochester from the 1990s through the end of the 2010s, a conjuncture that ended with Crimp’s death in 2019. Film (and later media) studies, a program in which Sharon Willis, Constance Penley, Kaja Silverman, and David Rodowick taught, was also a part of the comparative studies configuration, making Rochester one of the few places in the early 1990s where one could pursue doctoral studies that spanned art history and film studies while maintaining a sustained commitment to bridging art practice and critical theory.

At the same time, our ideas about the book involved contributions from communication studies, a field that was foundational to cultural studies both in the United Kingdom (through sociology at Birmingham) and in the United States (through the University of Illinois Champaign‐Urbana campus, where Treichler and Larry Grossberg taught). Marita was teaching at the University of California, San Diego, in a communication department (which Lisa would later join) that was acquiring faculty members in humanities‐based cultural studies and critical theory, and that offered feminist political theory. Marita later moved to the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, to a program that was largely social science‐based and had strengths in mass communication and communication management; she was one of the first faculty members at this leading communication school with a profile in visual and cultural studies. Later, colleagues at Annenberg such as Sarah Banet‐Weiser, Larry Gross, Josh Kun, and Henry Jenkins would take part in expanding the more traditional communication curriculum into visual culture, popular culture, and feminist media studies.

Our combined work on Practices of Looking was thus informed in great part by a practical desire for the book to support combined approaches that encompassed our mix of commitments, as well as our aim to speak to students across a range of disciplinary contexts. Our goal was to offer a kind of flexible toolbox of theories and examples to the core curricula of visual culture studies as the latter was introduced to fields such as art practice, art history, film, comparative literature, and literary studies. We briefly considered an anthology, but felt the need was more urgent for a book that, like Berger’s Ways of Seeing, synthesized and explained how this conjuncture of concerns and approaches came together and how it could work into the future.

Our prior experience in arts‐based media practice informed our conception of the book as well, and merits explanation. This orientation may explain why the book has been widely adopted in art schools. In the second and third editions we were more explicit in our redesign of the book so as to match changes in art school and art training contexts. In 1960, British art schools were subject to a compulsory art history and design curricular components (Gee 2017, 61), with the interesting side effect that art students, in Britain at least, were likely to encounter the Marxist, feminist, semiotic, and psychoanalytic theories that would come to inform the new art history of the 1970s and 1980s. In the United States, the Marxist and psychoanalytic turn in film studies generated attention to research‐based structural and experimental film practice and political art film. Theory was done not only in writing but also in the forms of film and video. Experimental and political art film and the new medium of video art followed photography into the art school curriculum during this decade. At the same time, the shift in focus, in the 1970s, from popular literature to cinema and television at the Birmingham School’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies under Stuart Hall brought the discipline of cultural studies squarely into the realm of visual theory, and its focus on means of production in turn informed both art film practice and humanities‐based film studies pedagogy, in a range of national settings where Frankfurt School theory had made inroads. Convergence, a term often used to describe industry technology mergers, impacted field formation in myriad ways. Cultural studies approaches were combined, in ways that were sometimes contradictory and messy, with semiotic, feminist, and psychoanalytic theories, as well as with American cultural studies approaches coming out of communication research programs such as the one at the University of Illinois at Champaign‐Urbana.

In the United States, these theories were variously informing visual practice in just a few institutions—notably Cornell, where Marita studied photography before decamping to study photography and video at the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, and the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, where Lisa briefly studied. Our early choice of media over more traditional art forms was consistent with postminimalist turns toward media in the era of institutional critique (consider Allan Sekula’s hybrid critical theory and photography practice, or Richard Serra’s 1973 video installation Television Delivers People) and with the turn to video performance (as seen in the work of Martha Rosler) and to political cinema (exemplified by Yvonne Rainer’s experimental theory film narratives) in feminist art practice. The critical theory emphasis on practice informed a turn to video criticism in Marita’s practice that was published in the Visual Studies Workshop‐based journal Afterimage; then it led her to work in the Museum of Modern Art film department. Lisa shifted from experimental film practice to feminist and queer media criticism with the Heresies Collective, a women’s group and movement that produced a path‐breaking issue on women and political media practice in its eponymous journal. These turns toward research and writing remained grounded in an affinity with practice and activism, feeding a broader theory–practice ethos that eventually shaped our collaboration on Practices of Looking.

Our graduate “training” in the field of visual culture scholarship was idiosyncratic, though in different ways. We both shunned traditional art history and cinema studies, joining instead programs oriented toward training in political theory and social history. Lisa did her doctoral study in the American Studies department at Yale University; there she focused on photography history with Alan Trachtenberg and on film theory with David Rodowick, but applied all this to biomedical imaging, engaging feminist health activism and technoscience theory. The History of Consciousness Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, from which Marita received her PhD, was renowned for its constellation of postmodern, feminist, and critical theory scholars; these included historians Hayden White and James Clifford and feminist science studies scholar Donna Haraway. Yet at the time the program had only minimal engagement with visual culture, through the work of film theorist Teresa de Lauretis. We offer these details in part to demonstrate that the field of visual culture emerged not simply through academic “interdisciplinarity,” a buzzword of the 1990s, but through the negotiation of political interests and concerns with an orientation to the visual that was deeply invested in the politics of cultural production—the theorizing of which our book offers mixed tools. Thus, although the field’s foundation is in many cases narrated as a merger between art history and newer fields, such as comparative literature or film studies, those disciplines were not primary points of reference or direct venues of training for either of us, despite our engagement with contemporary art practice and many of the core aspects of those fields. Thus our agenda—to make over John Berger’s account—was strongly motivated by this sense that visual culture’s foundation must be broader, because the field is so much more entangled in a reflexive political history of cultural practice than is suggested by a version of visual culture studies conceived of either as the new art history or as the disciplinary merger of the new art history and the film and media theory of the 1990s. We were also motivated by what Donna Haraway (2016) more recently has called “staying with the trouble”: holding on to differences rather than offering a unified account.

Our first draft of Practices of Looking was suggestive and open‐ended, leaving many ways of doing interpretation up to the reader and doing so by design. This approach did not sit very well with some of the first press reviewers, who felt that we needed to interpret the images with more specificity, provide more textual analysis—in order to make the book, in effect, more of an instructional, how‐to‐read‐images teaching book. Although we decided to go with Oxford University Press, its New York office was not interested in the book. The first edition was published by the UK office of the press and was aimed in part at the British context of art school and emerging visual culture programs. Later, after the book did particularly well in the United States, the New York office took over our contract for the second edition and classified the book as a textbook. It had not been written with this intention.

When Practices of Looking was first published, we were surprised at the extent to which it had a life of its own. It was taught in many different kinds of classrooms, more broadly than we had imagined. The timing of the publication was serendipitous: the book coincided with trends in pedagogy that suggested the field of visual culture was emerging in several disciplines at once, and not simply in innovative and forward‐thinking art history departments. Communication departments, history and literature departments, and critical theory programs in art schools were using the book. Whereas we, as we have noted, were trained in the humanities, we both landed in communication departments early on in our careers. Thus we had found it necessary to explain our interests and our research and teaching methods often, not only to students but also to peers and supervisors. Why consider art in the context of communication studies? How was visual culture pertinent outside popular media cultures? The dynamic was reciprocal. As we become more entrenched in communication studies, we imported the field’s methods, histories, and interests into the second and third editions of the book. It may be said they were already present in the first edition’s media and advertising chapters, of course, but these became more integral to the book’s scope and structure in the subsequent editions.

The unexpected popularity of Practices of Looking as a teaching book resulted in unexpected outcomes for us as co‐authors. The most obvious of these was the demand that the book be updated, a requirement that came of course from our publisher. Academic writers are all too familiar with the demand placed by publishing houses on authors of textbooks to revise their books so that students must acquire a new edition rather than cheaper, used copies of an earlier edition. We were reticent to comply. When we wrote the first edition, we had naively assumed that we would write one book, and that it might continue to have relevance (as Ways of Seeing had done). But we began to see that the book was becoming outdated in a relatively short period of time. The world of image production and consumption had changed significantly, and the theoretical concepts necessary to make sense of images, visuality, the changing worlds of the Internet, image circulation, and social media, and the politics and dynamics of global media production had been transformed. Global and local political uprisings and social movements needed to be addressed, as did important shifts in scholarship and practice around colonial and postcolonial modernity and globalism. Thus we were compelled to rewrite almost three quarters of the book for its second edition, and nearly as much for the third. The process has thus been a kind of taking stock in eight‐year increments, even though the structure and many of the basic theories remain in place. An example will help to demonstrate this point. In the first edition we wrote about Foucault on both biopower, and the internalization of discipline and surveillance. We cited the now familiar examples of exercise culture and body image and the panopticon. By the third edition, these concepts were adapted to discussing body‐tracking devices such as the FitBit and surveillance in militarized global information systems in political countermovements.

For the second edition, which was released in 2008, some of the revision was driven by changes in technology such as the emergence of the web as a platform for images, entertainment media, and commerce. The rise of Google, the emergence of YouTube (which began as an amateur video‐sharing site in 2005), and the increase of broadband, which enabled changing trends in the digital global circulation of images, all needed to be accounted for. It is amusing to note that, in our concern not to have the second edition date too quickly, we discussed whether to include YouTube, wondering whether it would last or fade quickly, as other Internet startups had. Even more urgently, we needed to address visual culture in the post‐9/11 world, in which images played a powerful role in the experience and memorialization not only of 9/11 but also of events such as the Iraq War, or Abu Ghraib prison culture: there the media did not simply document but served as a key factor in the staging of conflict and the enactment of abuse. Shifts in cultural trends also needed to be addressed as we reworked the book – the increasing global circulation of television formats and film genres, for example, the emergence of animation as a key genre of ironic and critical modes of cultural expression, and video gaming as a major form of cultural production and distribution.

Our eventual work on a third edition of the book, released in 2018, challenged us to see how dramatically certain aspects of visual culture had been transformed yet again, in particular in relation to practices of surveillance and to the emergence of a culture in which the consumer’s cultural production—the taking of pictures—had become fully ubiquitous, undoing the binary of consumption and production that had informed the Frankfurt School model, which had been dominant in the late twentieth century. In the 2010s the smartphone, first introduced in 2007, became the primary device for everyday image culture, transforming how, when, and of what people take pictures. Social media and Facebook (founded in 2004), increasingly designed to support still images and video, and Instagram (introduced in 2010 and bought by Facebook in 2012), had sprung up as key sites for sharing images in a market increasing shared by TikTok (founded in 2012). These corporate entities changed the role of images in networks and in the creation of social connection (hence the birth of the selfie). At the same time, image stockpiling and brokering had become high‐stakes big business. And, inexplicably, in the wake of the 2008 economic collapse, the art market appeared as an investment option of choice among the “one percent”; thus its elite global art fair and museum culture ascended in tandem with the media, the image, and information‐savvy cultures of movements such as Occupy, the Arab Spring, and Black Lives Matter. We marveled at YouTube’s cultural dominance and at the platform’s success in spawning new genres of its own. This culture of ubiquitous non‐professional image production gave rise to citizen journalism, a phenomenon that continues to undermine the careers of professional journalists but that has made possible witness documentation of police violence and murder of black and brown peoples in the United States, where the Black Lives Matter movement has used witness documentation as a media and legal tool while also raising important concerns about the politics of image‐sharing strategies. Yet the consumer as producer and witness has also shown us the limits and contingencies of “visual power”: such images have thus far failed to secure justice for the victims of police violence, in spite of the recognition that they constitute clear evidence of these acts. In our work on the second edition, and even more so on the third, we aimed to shift the scope of the book so as not only to address the global circulation of images and the global flow of culture, but also to deprovincialize the canon, to move away from its Euro‐American‐centric focus, and to include more work by women artists and artists of color, and to emphasize artists who work on political issues through research‐based practice. This shift entailed, in part, reworking theories of modernity to better account for the literature on postcolonial and settler histories and, in part, tracking new research into image cultures in the movement politics of the 2010s.

Revising the book has never been simply a matter of updating examples or tracking the changes in visual culture on a global scale; it has been about accounting for the changes in theoretical frameworks and orientations with the urgency that situations in the world have demanded of us. We revised and updated our range of theorists and moved the book with the political times. Increasingly, aspects of the theory with which we began needed more critical contextualization; they had to be read as foundational, but also as problematic and limited in relation to contemporary visual culture, as we underwent shifts in the framing of matters of identity, race, class, nationality, sexuality, and ability in relation to visual practice and visuality. We increasingly reworked the canon that we had introduced in the beginning, even as we aimed to expand and revise it.

In the 2010s we also felt that the field itself was shifting toward important new emphases, toward a focus on visuality, countervisuality, visual activism, and decolonial frameworks, much of which Nicholas Mirzoeff (2011, 2016) has taken on in his own work in the field and we have incorporated into the book’s theoretical framework. De‐emphasizing representation as a form of analysis in the book was motivated in part by the recognition that we needed to emphasize fields of visuality, the built environment, and the increasingly constitutive aspects of the visual in fields like science and medicine.

The different editions of the book chart a particular history of the field that has become more institutionalized since we began this project: there are now doctoral programs focused on visual culture (at the University of California, Irvine, Brown University, and New York University); there is a field‐specific journal (the Journal of Visual Culture); and there is a biannual conference with a professional association (the International Association for Visual Culture). In the same way, our own academic affiliations have migrated toward the field. Marita now teaches in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, which places a strong emphasis on visual culture through such scholars as Nicholas Mirzoeff, Allen Feldman, Erica Robles‐Anderson, and Kelli Moore, for example. Lisa is now on the faculty of the Visual Arts Department at the University of California San Diego, where she teaches with Rochester program founder Norman Bryson and with Grant Kester, who received his PhD from that program, with science, art, and film historian Alena Williams, with activist artist Ricardo Dominguez, and with pictures generation artist Amy Adler, among others. San Diego’s visual arts curriculum combines art and media practice, theory, history, and criticism, and the department offers one of the few art practice PhD concentrations in art history in the United States. In a certain sense, we have inadvertently contributed to an institutionalization of the field—which, as these trajectories can attest, was the least of our concerns when we first began writing a book together in the late 1990s. It is our hope that, in the current political climate of 2020—when we revise and update this contribution amid a global viral pandemic and a national uprising against epidemic police violence directed at black and brown people—our book may be useful to artists and scholars who are hoping to act and make changes in ways that engage and resist visuality in its relationship to meaning and power. We persisted with the book as toolkit for action and engagement, a role that we hope it will continue to serve.