Laura Mulvey (born 15 August 1941) is a British feminist film theorist. She was educated at St Hilda’s College, Oxford. She is currently professor of film and media studies at Birkbeck, University of London. Mulvey is best known for her essay, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, written in 1973 and published in 1975. It was the subject of much interdisciplinary discussion among film theorists, which continued into the mid-1980s. Critics of the article pointed out that Mulvey’s argument implies the impossibility of the enjoyment of classical Hollywood cinema by women, and that her argument did not seem to take into account spectatorship not organized along normative gender lines. Regarding Mulvey’s view of the identity of the gaze, some authors questioned “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” on the matter of whether the gaze is really always male. Mulvey does not acknowledge a protagonist and a spectator other than a heterosexual male, failing to consider a woman or homosexual as the gaze.

John Peter Berger was an English art critic, novelist, painter and poet.  His essay on art criticism Ways of Seeing written as an accompaniment to the BBC series of the same name, is often used as a university text. He lived in France for over fifty years. In 1972, the BBC broadcast his four-part television series Ways of Seeing and published its accompanying text, a book of the same name. The first episode functions as an introduction to the study of images.