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.
[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.
[6] Cartwright is a professor in the departments of Visual Arts, Communication and Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego.