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.
Born and brought up in Battersea, south London, Martin was the son of Eileen (nee Beavis), a hairdresser, and David Lister, an engineer for London Transport involved in the development of the original Routemaster bus. Martin went to Sir Walter St John’s school, then trained as a fine art painter at Kingston School of Art, graduating in 1968. In 1974 he completed an MA in philosophical aesthetics and art theory at the University of Essex, where he was taught by the renowned art historian Michael Podro.
Martin married Debbie Hood, a secondary school teacher, in 1969 – they attended the Stones in the Park concert in Hyde Park as their wedding reception, along with 300,000 other people.
In 1977 Martin joined Cockpit Arts Workshop in Marylebone, employed as a lecturer to devise and run integrated arts and museum education projects for inner London schools. I had the same role there, and we established a lifelong working relationship. Martin was committed to using photography with young people to record and express the world as they experienced it, and in 1988 he and I co-authored the book Youth, Culture and Photography.
The following year, Martin moved to Newport College of Art and Design, now merged into the University of South Wales, where he taught critical and cultural studies across fine art, design, photography and film degrees. In 1995 he took up a post at UWE, becoming head of the school of cultural studies in 2001, and professor of visual culture in 2004, until retirement in 2009.
For the last 11 years of his life, Martin was dedicated to caring for Debbie, who had suffered a stroke. She survives him, as do their son Joe, two granddaughters, Zara and Dulce, and his sister, Jane. Another son, Eddie, predeceased him.
