Includes bibliographical references and index.

Practices of Looking: 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 -- Viewers Make Meaning -- Producers' intended meanings -- Aesthetics and taste -- Reading images as ideological subjects -- Encoding and decoding -- Appropriation and oppositional readings -- Re-appropriations and counter-bricolage -- Spectatorship, Power, and Knowledge -- Psychoanalysis and the image spectator -- The gaze -- Changing concepts of the gaze -- Discourse, the gaze, and the other -- Power/knowledge and panopticism -- The gaze and the exotic -- Reproduction and Visual Technologies -- Realism and the history of perspective -- Realism and visual technologies -- The reproduction of images -- Reproduced images as politics -- Visual technologies and phenomenology -- The digital image -- Virtual space and interactive images -- The Mass Media and the Public Sphere -- Critiques of the mass media -- The mass media and democratic potential -- Television and the question of sponsorship -- Media and the public sphere -- New media cultures -- Consumer Culture and the Manufacturing of Desire -- Consumer society -- Commodity culture and commodity fetishism -- Addressing the consumer -- Images and text -- Envy, desire, and glamour -- Belonging and difference -- Bricolage and counter-bricolage -- The brand -- Anti-ad practices -- Postmodernism and Popular Culture -- Modernism -- Postmodernism -- Reflexivity -- The copy, pastiche, and institutional critique -- Popular culture: parody and reflexivity -- Addressing the postmodern consumer -- Scientific Looking, Looking at Science -- Images as evidence -- Scientific looking -- Images in biomedicine: sonograms and fetal personhood -- Scientific images as advocacy and politics -- Vision and truth -- Genetics and the digital body -- Popular science -- The Global Flow of Visual Culture -- Television flow: from the local to the global -- The critique of cultural imperialism -- Markets of the Third World -- Alternative circulations: hybrid and diasporic images -- The Internet: global village or multinational corporate marketplace? -- The World Wide Web as private and public sphere -- The challenge of the Internet to privacy, censorship, and free speech -- The place of the visual in the new millennium.

This comprehensive and engaging introduction to visual culture explores the ways we use and understand images. It looks at painting, photography, film, television, and new media across the realms of art, advertising, news, science, and law. Authors Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright present the diverse range of approaches to visual analysis that have emerged in the last few decades, and lead the reader through the key theories of visual culture in an accessible and highly readable approach.

Including over 180 images, this truly interdisciplinary and beautifully designed book aims to be a comprehensive introduction for anyone interested in images, and the key text for courses across a range of disciplines including media and film studies, art history, photography, and communication.