One of the greatest things about Practices of Looking is that it also considers those of us who are “blind or have low vision.” It is enlightened in that aspect.
“Looking is a social practice, whether we do it by choice or compliance. Through looking, and through touching and hearing as means of navigating space organized around the sense of sight, we negotiate our social relationships and meanings” (9). More or less, everyone sees or looks.
“Looking involves relationships of power ” (9).
*Representation: The use of language and images to create meaning about the world around us.
“In the context of positivism, the photographic camera could be understood as a scientific tool for registering reality more accurately” (17). This makes me think of photo journalism.
There is an argument as to whether “photographers are objective renderings of the real word the provide unbiased truth” (17). Why does it have to be so cut and dry? Can’t it be a mix of both? Must there be one absolute answer.
“Barthes coined the use of the term punctum to characterize the affective element of those certain photographs that pierce one’s heart with feeling” (18). Punctum is usually one of the main reasons that I love the works of art that I love.
“The photograph is imagined to have depending on its context, a power that is primarily affective or a power that is primarily informative. Both powers reside in the mythical truth-value of the photograph” -Allan Sekula (18).
According to Roland Barthes, “myth is the hidden set of rules and conventions through which meanings, which are specific to certain groups, are made to seem universal and given for a whole society” (20). Practices of seeing list the modern representation of very thin bodies as beauty as a myth. It makes it appear that being thin is beautiful everywhere, in every culture, when it in fact is not.
“Certain notions of beauty are standardized, such as whiteness, symmetry, and full lips” (22).
“To explore the meaning of images is to recognize that they are produced within dynamics of social power and ideology. Ideologies are systems of belief that exist within all cultures. Images are an important means through which ideologies are produced and onto which ideologies are projected” (23).
* Ideologies: The broad but indispensable shared sets if values and beliefs through which individuals live out their complex relations in a range of social networks (23).
“In addition, in the late nineteenth century there was a craze of purchasing carte de visites of well-known people, such as the British royal family. This practice signaled the role of that photographic images would play in the construction of celebrity throughout the twentieth century” (24). I would like to do a case study in which I research a trend in history and find when it reoccurs.
There is so much great art in Practices of Looking. So far I haven’t seen one piece that I did not love.
Image/sound/word = Signifier
Meaning = Signified
Signifier + Signified = Sign
“The production of a sign is dependent on social, historical, and cultural context. It is also dependent on the context in which the image is presented (in a museum gallery or a magazine, for instance) and on the viewers who interpret it. We live in a world of signs, and it is the labor of our interpretation that makes the signifier-signified relationship fluid and active in the production of signs and meanings” (29). Okay, I am trying to understand this.
I wish this book had a chart with the different beliefs of Peirce, Barthes, and Saussure’s ideas about signs so that it was easier to understand. I may have to create on myself.
According to Peirce, “Symbols are created through an arbitrary (one could say ‘unnatural’) alliance of a particular object and a particular meaning” (32).
