My friend Martin Lister, who has died aged 78, was a writer and teacher of photography and new media, with an abiding interest in how technologies were entangled with cultural ways of seeing. Martin’s work brought clear thinking to the often overhyped conjunction of cultural studies, art history and the nascent forms of media.
As head of the school of cultural studies at the University of the West of England (UWE), he maintained a scholarly research practice, publishing and lecturing widely across Europe and the UK. In 1995 Martin edited The Photographic Image in Digital Culture, which ran into a second revised edition (2013). In that book, Martin meticulously charted a crucial technological and cultural shift in which the analogue means of reproduction had all but given way to digitisation. A co-authored book New Media: A Critical Introduction (2003) made the case for the emergence of new media, distinct from the analogue worlds of film, photography and television. This too became a standard teaching text for those trying to understand the emergence of digital cultures.
