Final Exam Review

Format: You will be asked to write two short essays from a choice of three topics drawn from the areas listed below. I may project images for you to write about in relation to the texts we have been reading/talking about.

Assessment: You will be graded on your comprehension, critical engagement with and synthesis of the texts and concepts that we have addressed. Your essay should clearly demonstrate that you understand the basic concepts and frameworks in the readings. A higher score will be given for essays that clearly explain concepts from the texts, but also reflect on them and offer your critical appraisal (for example: by discussing further implications of the material or by raising questions or arguments about the limitations of the authors’ ideas). You will be given points for:

• define key terms that you will be using (ones that have particular meaning in the context o the texts). You can do this up front or in the context of the essay as they are introduced. In studying for the test you may want to use the glossary in Practices of Looking. another good source is the wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/

•  

• being concise (to the point). Longer isn’t necessarily better.
• directly referencing concepts, statements, or examples made in the reading
• qualifying or critically engaging the authors (for example posing further questions or noting about exceptions to a theory or making an argument against a position in the texts)

1.  Reproduction and Circulation of Images:

Reading:

• Walter Benjamin “Small History of Photography” (1931)
• Stuken and  Cartwright, “Chapter: 4: Reproduction and Visual Technologies"

Concepts:

Benjamin:

• Photography was ripe for invention (over-determined) in the 1820-30s. Examples of technologies leading up to invention of the camera:
• camera obscura
• microscope
• lithography
• Benjamin suggests that photography flowered in its first decade and was appropriated toward commercial ends with the main form being the visiting card.
• Benjamin suggests a shift from consideration of "photography as art" to "art as photography"
• dismisses arguments that photography can’t be an art
• shifts to notion that much art was based on photos
• deguetatypes were treated like jewels
• the photograph offers something beyond the technical that painting will never give us. We search for a contingency –some aspect of the here and now.
• the camera presents another nature: the space informed by human consciousness gives way to the space of the unconscious.
• Aura: unique experience of time/space and distance. Aura relates to the notion of authenticity and the experience of distance in even the closest object.
• With photography and the age of mechanical reproduction art shifts from ritual practice (belief/value based in fetish) to political practice (conscious rational belief).
• Reproduction is associated with a distinct form of political experience (the shift in value associated with images)
• Benjamin suggests that the individual image has lost its power to do anything but affirm the status quo. (This is a function of the complexity of the social order of modernity). He emphasizes the significance of the caption, the serial image, and montage.

Sturken and Cartwright:

• Images of the past are viewed differently than when they were created
• codes of classical styles are appropriated in contemporary photography
• the history of realism perspective and conventions for depicting space
• the enlightenment, science and the visual
• photography emerged when it did because it fit certain emerging social concepts and needs—modern  ideas about the individual in growing urban centers, technological progress, mechanization, bureaucracy. It emerged when discourses of science, law and technology made its social role possible.
• photography ushered in responses to perspective (it allowed for optical paradigms that altered our relation to time and space)—this is a bit different that Cartwright/Sturken spin.  I say this because photography was indeed a technical culmination of the technology of perspective, but it also exceeded the objectives of perspective in important ways. It facilitated a notion of vision as never fixed even as it fixed images.
• Key points about photographic reproduction
• mirrors or echos industrial reproduction, and was also integrated with various process of mass society.
• was predated by lithography and other image reproduction techniques
• allows for displacement of images in time and space
• allows for the commodification of images, and communication through images on a popular level
• changes our understanding of unique orignal work (labor, artifact, humanity). Authenticity and aura.

Key Terms:

• carte de visit
• camera obscura
• optical  unconscious
• aura
• montage
• mechanical reproduction
• realism
• perspective
• mass culture
• mass media

 

2. Ownership of Images and Image Rights

Reading: 

• John David Viera, "Images as Property"
• Alyson Lewis, "Playing Around with Barbie"

Concepts:

• Copyright law and duration of copyright have changed throughout history.
• What function is copyright law intended to serve?
• to support the public good by facilitating the creativity and invention.
• Copyright protects expression/execution of ideas—you can’t copyright a concept. There is a fine line between an idea and its expression
• What are the limitations/exceptions to copyright, why do they exist, and how are they interpreted?
• Fair use doctrine protects uses of copyrighted material for criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. Four main criteria are used to judge fair use (see link on class notes page).
• Temporal limitations to copyright.
• Copyright was conceived before the era of mechanical reproduction of images. (It was mainly geared toward texts and music.)
• When did publicity law get conceived and in relation to what (mass media)?
• Multiple creators: the rights of the subject/model vs the rights of the artist
• The role of the public in conferring value (publicity)
• The double role of images/icons as property and elements of discourse
• The multiple meanings of public, and the implications of placing oneself or images in public: Is the public of the street the same as the public of the mass media?
• How should we deal with images of private creative works displayed in public (buildings and statues)?
• Should the copying/reuse of mass cultural icons be limited? When does an icon like Barbie become an important part of public discourse and not simply private property?
• Today, is copyright mainly protecting creators and inventors or content providers?
• Examples given in the readings.

Key Terms:

• Privacy rights
• Publicity rights
• (Intellectual) Property rights
• copyright
• Fair Use
• public good
• trademark

3, Global Visual Culture

Reading: 

• Lisa Cartwright and Brian Goldfarb, "Cultural Contagion: On Disney's Health Education Films for Latin America"
• Sturken and Cartwright, "Ch 9: the Global Flow of Visual Culture"

Concepts:

• Transnational Circulation of Images
  • How images are negotiated across cultural contexts
  • Role of images in the transition from imperial/colonial era to postcolonial context
• Globalization
  • Increasing importance of cultural flows in international power relations
  • Rise of multinational corporations and a global economy
  • Wiring the world
  • The collapse of geographic distance
•    Convergence
  • Merger of previously discrete media industries and technologies
  • Intertextuality facilitates the breakdown of national boundaries
• Synergy
  • Programming, production, and distribution by single corporate entities on a global scale
  • Tension between globally shared visual cultures and rise of local hybrids.
• Television (and Film) flow: from local to global
  • Marketing of TV overseas sells more than programming–it sells ways of looking, and ways of life.
  • TV is tied to national cultures
• Cultural imperialism and critiques of the theory of cultural imperialism
  • Indigenous media
  • Local media and cultural forms respond to unique desires and needs of geographic and demographic communities
  • Diasporic media
    • multilingual
    • imports media and programming
    • narrowcast
    • is part of a hybrid culture
• Characterizing globalism:
  •        Interconnectivity–fluidity of national boundaries (with regard to information)
  •      Expanded trade
  •       Opportunity
  •       Migration and exile (economic, political, forced and voluntary)
  •      Hybridization of cultures
  •      Homogenization of culture (assimilation and displacement of traditional social values)
  •      Fragmentation
  •       Reinterpretation/transformation
  •       Uneven development (technological and cultural)
  •      Multidirectional and unidirectional flows of culture
  •       Displacement of national and local cultures/economies
  •      How cultural objects and forms are imbued with new meanings as they travel
  •       How imported cultural forms transform local cultures.
  •      Corporate mergers
  •     Translation and establishment of hierarchy of languages
  •      Role of visual culture in bridging linguistic and cultural differences

Key Terms:

•       imperialism
• cultural imperialism
• cultural indoctrination
• postcolonial
•       homogenization
•       hybridization
• globalization
•      global/local
•     convergence
•       synergy
•      indigenous media
•       diaspora (diasporic media)
•       narrowcast
  
  

4. Gender, Sexuality and Visuality

Reading: Nicholas Mirzoeff, "Seeing Sex"

Concepts:

• Theory of the sexual fetishism has to do with the fantasy of the mother’s castration; its denial and displacement.
• Everyday looking can be understood to involve fetishistic aspects. The need to deny difference (both the binary difference of heteronormative sexuality, and difference more broadly).
• Early modern western medicine created a one-sex model of human species. The male and female organs were inverted versions of one another.
• Thomas Lacquer, in Making Sex, explores how sexuality from the ancients through the Renaissance was structured quite differently than it was in the nineteenth century or is today.
• according to the scientists of the sixteenth century, anatomy itself  “displayed, at many levels and with unprecedented vigor, the 'fact' that the vagina really is a penis, and the uterus a scrotum"
• By around 1800 there emerged a drive to see fundamental differences in biological differences.
• Essentialism
• Foucault suggests that prior to the nineteenth century homosexuality (and other forms of deviance) didn’t exist. He posits a theory that sexuality is produced by its regimentation and the discourses that are often viewed as repressive. He argues against the repressive hypothesis
• Judith Butler argues that we cannot even assume a stable subjectivity that goes about performing various gender roles; rather, it is the very act of performing gender that constitutes who we are. Identity itself, for Butler, is an illusion retroactively created by our performances: "In opposition to theatrical or phenomenological models which take the gendered self to be prior to its acts, I will understand constituting acts not only as constituting the identity of the actor, but as constituting that identity as a compelling illusion, an object of belief"
• Butler takes her formulations even further by questioning the very distinction between gender and sex. In the past, feminists regularly made a distinction between bodily sex (the corporeal facts of our existence) and gender (the social conventions that determine the differences between masculinity and femininity).

Key Terms:

• fetish
• phallus
• castration
• inversion
• deviance
• intersex genital mutilation
• female genital mutilation
• queer
• the Other
• biopower (Foucault)