How do the authors distinguish between seeing? and looking?? Define representation. Can representation be defied or subverted? What is the ‘myth of photographic truth’? Define subjectiv

Practices of Looking10

Practices of Looking

Images, Power, and Politics

1

Every day, we are in the practice of looking to make sense of the world. To see

is a process of observing and recognizing the world around us. To look is to

actively make meaning of that world. Seeing is something that we do some-

what arbitrarily as we go about our daily lives. Looking is an activity that

involves a greater sense of purpose and direction. If we ask, “did you see that?”

we imply happenstance (“did you happen to see it?”). When we say “Look at

that!” it is a command. To look is an act of choice. Through looking we nego-

tiate social relationships and meanings. Looking is a practice much like speak-

ing, writing, or signing. Looking involves learning to interpret and, like other

practices, looking involves relationships of power. To willfully look or not is to

exercise choice and influence. To be made to look, to try to get someone else

to look at you or at something you want to be noticed, or to engage in an

exchange of looks, entails a play of power. Looking can be easy or difficult, fun

or unpleasant, harmless or dangerous. There are both conscious and uncon-

scious levels of looking. We engage in practices of looking to communicate, to

influence and be influenced.

We live in cultures that are increasingly permeated by visual images with a

variety of purposes and intended effects. These images can produce in us a

wide array of emotions and responses: pleasure, desire, disgust, anger, curios-

ity, shock, or confusion. We invest the images we create and encounter on a

daily basis with significant power—for instance, the power to conjure an

absent person, the power to calm or incite to action, the power to persuade

or mystify. A single image can serve a multitude of purposes, appear in a range

of settings, and mean different things to different people. The roles played by

images are multiple, diverse, and complex. This image, of school children in

the early 1940s who see a murder scene in the street, was taken by photog-

rapher Weegee (whose real name was Arthur Fellig). Weegee was known for

his images of crimes and violence in the streets of New York, where he would

listen to a police radio in order to get to crime scenes early. In this photograph,

he calls attention both to the act of looking at the forbidden and to the capac-

ity of the still camera to capture heightened emotion. The children are looking

at the murder scene with morbid fascination, as we look with equal fascina-

tion upon them looking.

The images we encounter every day span the social realms of popular

culture, advertising, news and information exchange, commerce, criminal

justice, and art. They are produced and experienced through a variety of

media: painting, printmaking, photography, film, television/video, computer

digital imaging, and virtual reality. One could argue that all of these media—

including those that do not involve mechanical or technological means of

production—are imaging technologies. Even paintings are produced with the

“technology” of paint, brush, and canvas. We live in an increasingly image-

saturated society where paintings, photographs, and electronic images

depend on one another for their meanings. The most famous paintings

of Western art history have been photographically and electronically

Practices of Looking 11

Weegee, Their First Murder, Before 1945

reproduced, and many of these reproductions have been touched up or

altered by means of computer graphics. For most of us, knowledge of famous

paintings is not first-hand, but through reproductions in books and on posters,

greeting cards, classroom slides, and television specials about art history. The

technology of images is thus central to our experience of visual culture.

Representation

Representation refers to the use of language and images to

create meaning about the world around us. We use words to understand,

describe, and define the world as we see it, and we also use images to do this.

This process takes place through systems of representation, such as language

and visual media, that have rules and conventions about how they are or-

ganized. A language like English has a set of rules about how to express and

interpret meaning, and so, for instance, do the systems of representation of

painting, photography, cinema, or television.

Throughout history, debates about representation have considered

whether these systems of representation reflect the world as it is, such that

they mirror it back to us as a form of mimesis or imitation, or whether in fact

we construct the world and its meaning through the systems of representa-

tion we deploy. In this social constructionist approach, we only make meaning

Practices of Looking12

of the material world through specific cultural contexts. This takes place in part

through the language systems (be they writing, speech, or images) that we

use. Hence, the material world only has meaning, and hence only can be

“seen” by us, through these systems of representation. This means that the

world is not simply reflected back to us through systems of representation,

but that we actually construct the meaning of the material world through these

systems.

Over time, images have been used to represent, make meaning of, and

convey various sentiments about nature, society, and culture as well as to rep-

resent imaginary worlds and abstract concepts. Throughout much of history,

for example, images, most of them paintings, have been used by religions to

convey religious myths, church doctrines, and historical dramas. Many images

have been produced to depict seemingly accurate renditions of the world

around us, while others have been created to express abstract concepts and

feelings such as love. Language and systems of representation do not reflect

an already existing reality so much as they organize, construct, and mediate

our understanding of reality, emotion, and imagination.

The distinction between the idea of reflection, or mimesis, and representa-

tion as a construction of the material world can often be difficult to make. The

still life, for instance, has been a favored subject of artists for many centuries.

One might surmise that the still life is simply about the desire to reflect, rather

than make meaning of, material objects. In this still life, painted in 1642 by

Dutch painter Pieter Claesz, an array of food and drink is carefully arranged on

a table, and painted with an attention to each minute detail. The objects, such

as the tablecloth, dishes, bread, carafe, and glass, are rendered with an atten-

tion to light and seem so lifelike that one imagines one could touch them. Yet,

is this image simply a reflection of this particular scene, rendered with skill by

the artist? Is it simply a mimesis of a scene, painted for the sake of demon-

strating skill? Claesz worked in the seventeenth century, when Dutch painters

were fascinated with the still life form, and painters painted many such works

with attention to creating the illusion of material objects on canvas. The Dutch

still life took the form of paintings that were straightforwardly representational

to those that were deeply symbolic. Many were not simply about a composi-

tion of food and drink, but replete with allusions and symbolism, as well as

philosophical ideas. Many works, such as this, were concerned with depicting

the transience of earthly life, through the ephemeral materiality of food. They

call forth the senses through the depiction of foods which are associated with

Practices of Looking 13

particular aromas, in which partially eaten foods evoked the experience of

eating. In this work, the fare is simple, a reference to the everyday food of the

common people, yet one can also see the potential religious allusions of

bread, wine, and fish to Christian rituals.1 Yet, even if we simply read this image

as a representation of food without any symbolism, its original meaning was

derived from its depiction of what food and drink meant in seventeenth-

century Holland. Here, the language of painting is used to create a particular

set of meanings according to a set of conventions about realistically depict-

ing the material world. We will discuss concepts of realism more in Chapter 4.

Here, we want to note that this painting produces meanings about these

objects, rather than simply reflecting some meaning that is already within

them.

Representation is thus a process through which we construct the world

around us, even through a simple scene such as this, and make meaning from

it. We learn the rules and conventions of the systems of representation within

a given culture. Many artists have attempted to defy those conventions,

to break the rules of various systems of representation, and to push at the

Practices of Looking14

Pieter Claesz, Still Life with Stoneware Jug, Wine Glass, Herring, and Bread, 1642

definitions of representation. In this painting, for example, Surrealist painter

René Magritte comments upon the process of representation. Entitled The

Treachery of Images (1928–29), the painting depicts a pipe with the line in

French, “This is not a pipe.” One could argue, on the one hand, that Magritte

is making a joke, that of course it is an image of a pipe that he has created.

However, he is also pointing to the relationship between words and things,

since this is not a pipe itself but rather the representation of a pipe; it is a paint-

ing rather than the material object itself. Philosopher Michel Foucault elabo-

rates these ideas in a short text about this painting and a drawing by Magritte

that preceded it. Not only does he address the painting’s implied commentary

about the relationship between words and things, he also considers the

complex relationship among the drawing, the painting, their words, and their

referent (the pipe). One could not pick up and smoke this pipe. So, Magritte

can be seen to be warning the viewer not to mistake the image for the real

thing. He is also marking the very act of naming, drawing our attention to the

word “pipe” itself, and its function in representing the object pipe. Both the

word “pipe” and the image of the pipe represent the material object pipe, and

in pointing this out, Magritte asks us to consider how they produce meaning

about it. Thus, when we stop and examine the process of representation, as

Practices of Looking 15

René Magritte, The Treachery of Images, 1928–29

Magritte asks us to do, a process that we normally take for granted, we can

see the complexity of how words and images produce meaning in our world.

The myth of photographic truth

The rules and conventions of different

systems of representation vary, and we attribute different sets of cultural

meanings to each—such as paintings, photographs, and television images.

Many of the images discussed in this book were produced by cameras and

through photographic or electronic technologies. These images belong to the

various worlds of fine art, public art, advertising, popular culture, alternative

media, the news media, and science.

No matter what social role an image plays, the creation of an image through

a camera lens always involves some degree of subjective choice through selec-

tion, framing, and personalization. It is true that some types of image record-

ing seem to take place without human intervention. In surveillance videos, for

instance, no one stands behind the lens to determine what should be shot and

how to shoot it. Yet even in surveillance video, someone has programmed the

camera to record a particular part of a space and framed that space in a

particular way. In the case of many automatic video and still-photography

cameras designed for the consumer market, aesthetic choices like focus and

framing are made as if by the camera itself, yet in fact the designers of these

cameras also made decisions based on social and aesthetic norms such as

clarity and legibility. These mechanisms are invisible to the user—they are

black-boxed, relieving the photographer of various decisions. Yet, it remains

the photographer who takes and chooses the image, not the camera itself. At

the same time, despite the subjective aspects of the act of taking a picture,

the aura of machine objectivity clings to mechanical and electronic images.

All camera-generated images, be they photographic, cinematic, or electronic

(video or computer-generated), bear the cultural legacy of still photography,

which historically has been regarded as a more objective practice than, say,

painting or drawing. This combination of the subjective and the objective is a

central tension in camera-generated images.

Photography was developed in Europe in the early nineteenth century,

when concepts of positivist science held sway. Positivism involves the belief

that empirical truths can be established through visual evidence. An em-

pirical truth is something that can be proven through experimentation, in

Practices of Looking16

particular through the reproduction of an experiment with identical outcomes

under carefully controlled circumstances. In positivism, the individual actions

of the scientist came to be viewed as a liability in the process of performing

and reproducing experiments, since it was thought that the scientist’s own

subjectivity would influence or prejudice the objectivity of the experiment.

Hence, machines were regarded as more reliable than humans. Similarly, pho-

tography is a method of producing images that involves a mechanical record-

ing device (the camera) rather than hand recording (pencil on paper). In the

context of positivism, the photographic camera was taken to be a scientific

tool for registering reality and regarded by its early advocates as a means of

representing the world more accurately than hand-rendered representations.

Since the mid-1800s, there have been many arguments for and against the

idea that photographs are objective renderings of the real world that provide

an unbiased truth because cameras are seemingly detached from a subjec-

tive, particular human viewpoint. These debates have taken on new intensity

with the introduction of digital imaging processes. A photograph is often per-

ceived to be an unmediated copy of the real world, a trace of reality skimmed

off the very surface of life. We refer to this concept as the myth of photo-

graphic truth. For instance, when a photograph is introduced as documentary

evidence in a courtroom, it is often presented as if it were incontrovertible

proof that an event took place in a particular way. As such, it is perceived to

speak the truth. At the same time, the truth-value of photography has been

the focus of many debates, in contexts such as courtrooms, about the differ-

ent “truths” that images can tell.

Camera images are also associated with truth-value in more everyday set-

tings. A photograph in a family album is often perceived to tell the truth, such

as the fact that a particular family gathering took place, a vacation was taken,

or a birthday was celebrated. Photographs have been used to prove that

someone was alive at a given place and time in history. For instance, after the

Holocaust, many survivors sent photographs to their families from whom they

had been long separated as an affirmation of their being alive. It is a paradox

of photography that although we know that images can be ambiguous and are

easily manipulated or altered, particularly with the help of computer graphics,

much of the power of photography still lies in the shared belief that

photographs are objective or truthful records of events. Our awareness of the

subjective nature of imaging is in constant tension with the legacy of objec-

tivity that clings to the cameras and machines that produce images today.

Practices of Looking 17

Yet, the sense that photographic images are evidence of the real also gives

them a kind of magical quality that adds to their documentary quality. The

images created by cameras can be simultaneously informative and expressive.

This photograph was taken by Robert Frank in his well-known photographic

essay, The Americans, which he created while travelling around the USA in the

mid-1950s. This image documents a segregated group of white and black pas-

sengers on a city trolley in New Orleans. As a factual piece of evidence about

the past, it records a particular moment in time in the racially segregated

American South of the 1950s. Yet, at the same time, this photograph does

more than document facts. For some contemporary viewers, this image is

magically moving insofar as it evokes powerful emotions about the momen-

tous changes about to occur in the American South. The picture was taken

just before laws, policies, and social mores concerning segregation began to

Practices of Looking18

Robert Frank, Trolley–New Orleans, 1955–56

undergo radical changes in response to Civil Rights activism. The faces of the

passengers each look outward with different expressions, responding in dif-

ferent ways to the journey. It is as if the trolley itself represents the passage

of life, and the expressive faces of each passenger the way in which they con-

front and experience their life. The trolley riders seem to be eternally held

within the vehicle, a group of strangers thrown together to journey down the

same road, just as the Civil Rights era in the South brought together strangers

for a political journey. Thus, this photograph is valuable both as an empirical,

informational document and as an expressive vehicle. The power of the image

derives not only from its status as photographic evidence but from its power-

ful evocation of the emotions of life’s struggles. It thus demonstrates the

photograph’s capacity both to present evidence and to evoke a magical

or mythical quality.

In addition, this image, like all images, has two levels of meaning. French

theorist Roland Barthes described these two levels in the terms denotative

and connotative meaning. An image can denote certain apparent truths,

providing documentary evidence of objective circumstances. The denotative

meaning of the image refers to its literal, descriptive meaning. The same

photograph connotes more culturally specific meanings. Connotative mean-

ings rely on the cultural and historical context of the image and its viewers’

lived, felt knowledge of those circumstances—all that the image means to

them personally and socially. This Robert Frank photograph denotes a group

of passengers on a trolley. Yet, clearly its meaning is broader than this simple

description. This image connotes a collective journey of life and race relations.

The dividing line between what an image denotes and what it connotes can

be ambiguous, as in this image, where the facts of segregation alone may

produce particular connotative associations for some viewers. These two con-

cepts help us to think about the differences between images functioning as

evidence and as works that evoke more complex feelings and associations.

Another image of passengers on a trolley might connote a very different set

of meanings.

Roland Barthes used the term myth to refer to the cultural values and beliefs

that are expressed at this level of connotation. For Barthes, myth is the hidden

set of rules and conventions through which meanings, which are in reality

specific to certain groups, are made to seem universal and given for a whole

society. Myth thus allows the connotative meaning of a particular thing or

image to appear to be denotative, hence literal or natural. Hence, Barthes

Practices of Looking 19

argued, a French ad for Italian sauce and pasta is not simply presenting

a product but is producing a myth about Italian culture—the concept of

“Italianicity.”3 This message, wrote Barthes, is not for Italians, but is specifically

about a French concept of Italian culture. Similarly, one could argue that the

contemporary concepts of beauty and thinness naturalize certain cultural

norms of appearance as being universal. These norms constitute a myth in

Barthes’s terms, because they are historically and culturally specific, not

“natural.”

Barthes’s concepts of myth and connotation are particularly useful in exam-

ining notions of photographic truth. Among the range of images produced by

cameras, there are cultural meanings that affect our expectations and uses of

images. We do not, for example, bring the same expectations about the rep-

resentation of truth to newspaper photographs that we do to television news

images or to film images that we view in a movie theater. A significant differ-

ence among these forms is their relationship to time and their ability to be

widely reproduced. Whereas conventional photographs and films need to be

developed and printed before they can be viewed and reproduced, the elec-

tronic nature of television images means that they are instantly viewable and

can be transmitted around the world live. As moving images, cinematic and

television images are combined with sound and music in narrative forms, and

their meaning often lies in the sequence of images rather than its individual

frames.

Similarly, the cultural meanings of and expectations about computer and

digital images are different from those of conventional photographs. Because

computer images can look increasingly like photographs, people who produce

them sometimes play with the conventions of photographic realism. For

example, an image generated exclusively by computer graphics software can

be made to appear to be a photograph of actual objects, places, or people,

when in fact it is a simulation, that is, it does not represent something in the

real world. In addition, computer graphics programs can be used to modify or

rearrange the elements of a “realistic” photograph. Widespread use of digital

imaging technologies in the past decade has dramatically altered the status

of the photograph, particularly in the news media. Digital imaging thus can be

said to have partially eroded the public’s trust in the truth-value of photogra-

phy and the camera image as evidence. Yet, at the same time, the altered

image may still appear to represent a photographic truth. The meaning of an

Practices of Looking20

image, and our expectations of it, is thus tied to the technology through which

it is produced. We will discuss this further in Chapter 4.

Images and ideology

To explore the meaning of images is to recognize

that they are produced within dynamics of social power and ideology. Ideo-

logies are systems of belief that exist within all cultures. Images are an impor-

tant means through which ideologies are produced and onto which ideologies

are projected. When people think of ideologies, they often think in terms of

propaganda—the crude process of using false representations to lure people

into holding beliefs that may compromise their own interests. This under-

standing of ideology assumes that to act ideologically is to act out of igno-

rance. In this particular sense, the term “ideology” carries a pejorative cast.

However, ideology is a much more pervasive, mundane process in which we

all engage, whether we are aware of it or not. For our purposes, we define

ideology as the broad but indispensable, shared set of values and beliefs

through which individuals live out their complex relations to a range of social

structures. Ideologies are widely varied and exist at all levels of all cultures.

Our ideologies are diverse and ubiquitous; they inform our everyday lives in

often subtle and barely noticeable forms. One could say that ideology is the

means by which certain values, such as individual freedom, progress, and the

importance of home, are made to seem like natural, inevitable aspects of

everyday life. Ideology is manifested in widely shared social assumptions

about not only the way things are but the way we all know things should be.

Images and media representations are some of the forms through which we

persuade others to share certain views or not, to hold certain values or not.

Practices of looking are intimately tied to ideology. The image culture in

which we live is an arena of diverse and often conflicting ideologies. Images

are elements of contemporary advertising and consumer culture through

which assumptions about beauty, desire, glamour, and social value are both

constructed and responded to. Film and television are media through which

we see reinforced ideological constructions such as the value of romantic love,

the norm of heterosexuality, nationalism, or traditional concepts of good and

evil. The most important aspect of ideologies is that they appear to be natural

or given, rather than part of a system of belief that a culture produces in order

Practices of Looking 21

to function in a particular way. Ideologies are thus, like Barthes’s concept of

myth, connotations parading as denotations.

Visual culture is integral to ideologies and power relations. Ideologies

are produced and affirmed through the social institutions in a given society,

such as the family, education, medicine, the law, the government, and the

entertainment industry, among others. Ideologies permeate the world of

entertainment, and images are also used for regulation, categorization,

identification, and evidence. Shortly after photography was developed in the

early nineteenth century, private citizens began hiring photographers to make

individual and family portraits. Portraits often marked important moments

such as births, marriages, and even deaths (the funerary portrait was a

popular convention). But photographs were also widely regarded as tools of

science and of public surveillance. Astronomers spoke of using photographic

film to mark the movements of the stars. Photographs were used in hospitals,

mental institutions, and prisons to record, classify, and study populations.

Indeed, in rapidly growing urban industrial centers, photographs quickly

became an important way for police and public health officials to monitor

urban populations perceived to be growing not only in numbers, but also in

rates of crime and social deviance.

What is the legacy of this use of images as a means of controlling popula-

tions today? We live in a society in which portrait images are frequently used,

like fingerprints, as personal identification—on passports, driver’s licenses,

credit cards, and identification cards for schools, the welfare system, and

many other institutions. Photographs are a primary medium for evidence in

the criminal justice system. We are accustomed to the fact that most stores

and banks are outfitted with surveillance cameras and that our daily lives are

tracked not only through our credit records, but through camera records. On

a typical day of work, errands, and leisure, the activities of people in cities are

recorded, often unbeknownst to them, by numerous cameras. Often these

images stay within the realm of identification and surveillance, where they go

unnoticed by most of us. But sometimes their venues change and they circu-

late in the public realm, where they acquire new meanings.

This happened in 1994, when the former football star O. J. Simpson was

arrested as a suspect in a notorious murder case. Simpson’s image had pre-

viously appeared only in sports media, advertising, and celebrity news media.

He was rendered a different kind of public figure when his portrait, in the form

of his police mug shot, was published on the covers of Time and Newsweek

Practices of Looking22

Practices of Looking 23

magazines. The mug shot is a common use of photography in the criminal

justice system. Information about all arrested people, whether they are con-

victed or not, is entered into the system in the form of personal data, finger-

prints, and photographs. The conventions of the mug shot were presumably

familiar to most people who saw the covers of Time and Newsweek. Frontal

and side views of suspects’ unsmiling, unadorned faces are shot. These

conventions of framing and composition alone connote to viewers a sense

of the subject’s deviance and guilt, regardless of who is thus framed; the

image format has the power to suggest the photographic subject’s guilt.

O. J. Simpson’s mug shot seemed to be no different from any other in

this regard.

Whereas Newsweek used the mug shot as it was, Time heightened the con-

trast and darkened Simpson’s skin tone in its use of this image on the maga-

zine’s cover, reputedly for “aesthetic” reasons. Interestingly, the magazine’s

publishers do not allow this cover to be reproduced. What ideological assump-

tion might be said to underlie this concept of aesthetics? Critics charged that

Time was following the historical convention of using darker skin tones to

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