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