Practices of Looking

Here is a quick summary of the chapter of Practices of Looking that you need to read for next week.  Please read actively.  This means using techniques like underlining, taking notes, outlining the content, and further researching images, artists, or ideas that are mentioned that you might not fully understand.  Please come to class next week with 3 questions/thoughts that you have prepared for class discussion.

Chapter 1: Practices of Looking: Images, Power, and Politics

Chapter 1 introduces many of the central themes of the book: the social roles of images in contemporary culture, the concept of representation, the relationship of images and ideology, the use of semiotics to interpret images, and the ways that societies award value to images. This Chapter introduces the general argument that the diverse and complex array of images we encounter in our everyday lives, from paintings to news images to digital representations, are subject to the dynamics of social power and ideology, and that images acquire meaning and value according to context and use. These concepts are explored through analysis of the concept of representation (from still-life painting to Magritte’s playful commentaries on images), the myth of photographic truth (through such images as Robert Frank’s photographs), the display of fine art (such as Vincent Van Gogh's paintings, viewed in museums or reproduced on shopping bags and puzzles), and the circulation of images through different social contexts (the appearance of O.J. Simpson's mug shot on the covers of Time and Newsweek). The role of image icons, ranging from the news image icon of the student stopping a tank in Tiananmen Square to the iconic images of Madonnas (from the history of painting to contemporary photographs and advertising to Madonna the performer), is analyzed, as well as the work by artists such as Andy Warhol who commented on such icons. This Chapter introduces the concept that practices of looking are not passive acts of consumption or interpretation, but that we as viewers negotiate the meanings and uses assigned to the images that fill our everyday lives.