Practices of Looking

Introduction to Visual Culture

Looking involves relationships to power. We engage in looking to communicate, influence or to be influenced. It is very aptly mentioned:

“The power to conjure an absent person, the power to calm or incite to action, the power to persuade or mystify, the power to remember.”

I strongly agree with the content of the reading when it talks about the power of images and how it can be comprehended in numerous ways by different people. Looking can be attributed to varied perceptions like in The First Murder, Weegee calls attention to both the act of looking at the forbidden scene of the brutal murder and the capacity of the camera to capture the heightened fleeting emotion. Here, the power of the photograph to provide evidence of violence and injustice is coupled with the photograph’s power to shock and horrify.

“We construct the meaning of things through the process of representing them.”

The paintings of the seventeenth and eighteenth century invoke a way of living even without the presence of human figures and produce meanings through the ways in which they are composed and rendered, and not just in the choices of the objects depicted.

I had not earlier given much thought into looking at a painting as a relationship between words and things the way Magritte points out in ‘The Treachery of Images’ which is a painting of a pipe and says “This is not a pipe” as it is a painting and not the material pipe itself. Magritte demonstrated that between words and objects one may create new relations and meanings through juxtaposition and changing contexts.

It is very aptly pointed out that we interpret images around us through the use of tools of semiotics and it is very interesting to note how our interpretation of images varies depending on our cultural knowledge & historical context. Adding text to an image to dictate the idea and purpose of the image is very common these days.

“The art of making do” is an interesting intervention that talks about the fact that viewers are not just passive recipients of public images and cultural products but explicators of things in their own ways.

Reading, viewing, text, language, image, all can be explicated by different people in disparate ways.