Lisa Cartwright

Lisa Cartwright is a scholar, author, professor and critic[1] best known for helping to found the field of visual culture studies and for coauthoring Practices of Looking, a widely translated visual studies textbook with Marita Sturken that is regarded as one of the first comprehensive books in the field after John Berger's Ways of Seeing.[2] In Practices of Looking, Cartwright and Sturken examine the complexity of the relationship between viewers and objects in a variety of visual media ranging from film and photography to advertising, painting, and printmaking. They pay especially close attention to the historical, social, and psychological conditions that help to constitute 'seeing' at any given moment.[2]

Cartwright is also known for her work in feminist visual science and technology studies and disability studies. In her 1995 book Screening the Body, for example, she shows how technological and scientific developments in medical imaging converge with the popular and social imagination to "make the body visible in new ways".[3] Here, among other things, she addresses how documentary imagery is produced and used for moralizing or spectacular ends, moves that undercut its supposedly scientific neutrality,[4] and how 'seeing' through medical optical instruments continues a displacement of direct sensory engagement that has been ramping up since the Renaissance.[5] Elsewhere, her essay on the Visible Human Project in The Visible Woman is cited as one that laid much of the groundwork for a critical examination of this large undertaking to create a complete set of cross-sectional photographs of the human body.[6]

Cartwright is a professor in the departments of Visual Arts, Communication and Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego.[1] She was a founding member of the Program in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester, where she taught from 1990 to 2002.

Education

Cartwright attended New York University (BFA, Film and Television, Tisch School of the Arts, 1982), and Yale University (Ph.D, American Studies, 1991). She took part in the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program in 1982.[1]

Publications

Books

Journal articles and book chapters

References

  1. 1 2 3 "Lisa Cartwright". UC San Diego, Department of Communication website.
  2. 1 2 Heinrichs, Jürgen. "Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright, Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture". Convergence 8:4 (2002), pp. 124–7. (Book review).
  3. Parks, Lisa. "Points of Departure: The Culture of US Airport Screening." Journal of Visual Culture 6.2 (2007): 183-200.
  4. Nichols, Bill. "Documentary film and the modernist avant-garde." Critical Inquiry (2001): 580-610.
  5. Wells, Liz. Photography: A Critical Introduction. Routledge, 2009.
  6. Shteir, Ann B., and Bernard Lightman, eds. Figuring It out: Science, Gender, and Visual Culture. Dartmouth, 2006.


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