Material culture has elaborated and is deeply visual

Visuals are ever disciplining and never innocent

Visual materials can be colonizing, racializing, gendering, sexing, classifying, stratifying, fetishizing, deceiving, authenticating, mesmerizing, transgressing, clarifying, stunning, muting, distracting, subjecting, cherishing, preserving, cluttering

They can be doing multiple and contradictory things at once

In the 19th-century West,

exotic colonial cultures

salvage ethnography, attempting to save remnants of disappearing cultures exoticizing and othering native peoples

 Urban life shows a great preponderance of occasions to than to hear people

see rather

It extends today to cultural studies topics such as tattoo, fashion, Las Vegas, video and teletechnology, film studies, media studies, and projects on visual cultures in science and medicine studies.

The new information technologies turn everyday life into a

theatrical spectacle; into sites where the dramas that

surround the decisive performances of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and age are staged

Visual cultures are produced through particular disciplines and discourses (Foucault 1975), or social worlds (Strauss 1978), and/or subcultures (Gelder & Thornton 1997)

Realisms and Gazes: Concepts and Studies

The critical paradigm

focuses attention on the unequal relations between social strata, and analysis is informed by a vision of a more equitable society it is concerned with what should be

The empirical paradigm

has classically not been concerned with what should be; one of its tenets has been that social inequalities have first to be empirically established to explore what human society is actually like.

the society of the spectacle

The spectacle is capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image, mediating social relations in ways that serve the needs of capital but obscure its power.

problematics of realism
visual materials are particularly important precisely because of the claims to realism !

myth of photographic truth think reflexively about how images are made acts of posing, framing, capturingand about viewing per se

This is not a pipe

the tendency to assume stability and authenticity The visual is surreal and in need of critical analysis

The issue is the power of what has been called

Who gets to look? At whom or what? Who is in control of seeing? Who/what is the object of the gaze? With what consequences?
The production of power relations through the practices of the gaze. (Foucault)

the gaze
Voyeurism

The Male Gaze

male authority in visual domains the gazer is usually assumed to be male/masculine, while the gazee is female/feminine who or whatever is gazed upon is feminized (read disempowered) by the gaze itself to-be-looked-at-ness

The imperial gaze

orientalism relations between Europe/the West and Asia/the East as based in the Western presumption of Western superiority an ongoing project, an outcome, and a continually remediated product of Western imperialism Emphasizing on racialization the stratification of races and ethnicities produced by and through colonization and its various forms of domination

how to look back defiantly and resist.

oppositional gaze

[I]t is the act of describing that enables the act of seeing.

analytic memos: producing various kinds of narratives about each visual.

Locating Memo
Situating the visual, how this image fits into the situation of inquiry that is your overall visual project focus why you chose this world(s) and these visual materials; where the image came from; who in particular produced it (if you know); for what audience(s), with what goals and intended uses; and so on

analytic memos: producing various kinds of narratives about each visual.

Big Picture Memo

First impressions
off the top of your head, what is this whole thing an image of?

The big picture

describing the visual fully, see more clearly, elaborately, and precisely

The little pictures

does the same for the different parts of the image for each segment what are these images of?

analytic memos: producing various kinds of narratives about each visual.

Specification Memo
Selection.
What is represented? Why do you think X, Y, or Z was selected rather than A, or B, or C?

Framing.
How is the subject framed? What is included, excluded, cut off at the edges?

Featuring.
What is foregrounded, middle-grounded, and backgrounded but still present?

Viewpoint.
Is the image a close-up, medium shot, long shot, low angle, high angle? What difference(s) do these make?

 Light.
How is light used in the image? What is featured through highlighting?

Backgrounded?
How does the variation in light direct your attention within the image? What is more or less obscured?

Color.
How is color used in the image? What is bright and vivid and what is not? How does the variation in color direct your attention within the image?

Focus/Depth of Field.
Is everything in sharp focus? If not, what is blurred? What is clear? How does the variation in focus direct your attention within the image?

 Presence/Absence.
Given the topic/focus of the image, is everything there that you would expect to be there? What is absent that you might have expected? What is different than you expected?

Intended/Unintended Audience(s).
Can you determine whether the image was aimed at any particular audience(s)? More than one? Who is not supposed to look here? Who would likely be made to feel uncomfortable looking here in mixed company? Mixed in what ways?

Composition.
What is emphasized? What is juxtaposed? What is placed apart? What is balanced/imbalanced? Are there tilted images? Moving images?

the rise of visual discourse

the rise of capitalism and consumption