LESSON 1

SEEING AS READING

3 Main Points in Seeing as Reading

1. We see things we are actively engaging with our environment rather than simply reproducing
everything within our line of sight.
2. Every act of looking and seeing is also an act of not seeing-some things must remain invisible if
we are to pay attention to other things in view.
3. The extent to which we see, focus on, and pay attention to the world around us. (Three actions
are inextricably linked, depends upon the specific context in which we find ourselves).

-Every perception and meaning are the product of psychological, physiological and, above all, cultural
contexts.

-It has long been accepted in what we call the human sciences and the humanities – particularly in
disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, linguistics, philosophy, literature, psychoanalysis, and cultural
theory – that we make sense of our world through the different meanings, ideas and categories available
to us.

SEEING IN CONTEXT

-Exhibits focus on how the environment affects the way we see everything – even things as fundamental
as color and brightness.

-At bright black, you will be presented with a simple card and asked to describe it. But your perception
of the card changes spectacularly as more of its surroundings are revealed.

Habitus:

A set of norms and expectations unconsciously acquired by individuals through experience and
socialization as embodied dispositions, ‘internalized as second nature’ (Bourdieu) predisposing us to act
improvisational in certain ways within the constraints of particular social fields. This concept was
proposed by Bourdieu as an integral part of behavior reflected in a ‘way of being’: including ways of
seeing, moving, talking, and so on. It functions to mediate between individual subjectivity and the social
structures of relations.

Cultural Literacy

Hirsch (1983) developed the term “cultural literacy” because people cannot learn reading, writing, and
other communication as skills separate from the culturally assumed knowledge that shapes what people
communicate about.

CULTURE-SPECIFIC; There are too many different cultures to be literate in all of them. Most people have
a fluent cultural literacy in their culture of origin, as they will have been learning their culture’s assumed
knowledge from childhood. You will need to develop new cultural literacies when you enter a new
culture, or interact with members of that culture.
TECHNIQUES OF SEEING AS READING

Important techniques for reading the visuals are:

Selection and omission, framing, and the evaluation-every act of looking and seeing is also an act of not
seeing. Selection, omission, framing, and evaluation produce a visual text.

SEEING IN THE TIME AND MOTION

ELEMENTS:

• COLOR
• SHAPE
• MOVEMENT
• TEXTURE
• DISTANCE
• LIGHT
• ETC.

TEXT AND INTERTEXT

A sign is anything that is treated as a meaningful part of the unit that is the text.

Identifying signs: group them together as if they were a unit by a process of relating available material to
the other texts and text-types with which we are familiar from our memories and cultural histories.

Intertextuality: The use of other texts to create new texts

Genre: the term for text-types

-frames and references that we use to negotiate, edit, evaluate, and in a sense read the visual as a series
of texts. And the way in which socio-cultural fields and institutions categorize people, place, events and
texts in terms of certain genres orients and disposes us to see and read the visual world in particular
ways.