Visual Cultural (COCU108)
Professor: Brian Goldfarb | Winter 2005, UCSD

Week 1: Defining Visual Culture Studies

Lisa Cartwright and Marita Sturken, "Introduction," Practices of Looking

Visual Cultural Studies is more than the study of images or objects: it is the study of vision and the visual world.

•       Visual modes of communication have proliferated and become increasingly significant in the twentieth century augmenting and displacing written/oral forms.
•       A tendency toward visualizing existence has progressed throughout modernity. This trajectory toward more elaborate forms of visualizaton has been characterized as part of a rational/scientific quest for increasing control over the world through techniques for recording, documenting, and codifying knowledge. (Power)
•       Nicolas Mirzoeff and others have noted that the modern world is characterized by the drive to visualize things which are not visible or visual: the diagram, the map, the cartiogram, the microscope, the x-ray, etc...

•       What are the implications of constituting a field of inquiry around looking as a practice as opposed to a field of object?
•       Looking (unlike vision) is a language. It is a form of communication that is learned and culturally specific. Visual Literacy

•       Is it possible to study diverse forms of visual culture together? And is it useful?
•       Meaning isn't confined to one discipline: scientific images are interpreted based on experiences in popular film and popular culture.
•       Practices of looking can be bridges between specialized discourses
•       Memory has a strong role in visual experience. We understand a visual image within a stream or network of other images and experiences--relationally
•     Images are understoood historically

•       Raymond Williams:  Culture is a set of shared practices for making meaning.
•       The anthropological definition of culture as a "way of life".
•       Seeing and believing--the relationship of seeing to belief systems.
•       "Meaning is shared, but not uniformly." There are always multiple potential meanings for an image or text. The same text or image suggests different meanings for different viewers or for the same viewer at different times. How can we explain this? What factors affect interpretation?
•       Meaning is contextual.
•       Making meaning is an active process--it is not purely a matter of perception or reception.
•       Meanings are produced not in the heads of viewers so much as through a process of negotiation--the play of interpretations.
•       Culture is a fluid and interactive process--not a set of images or objects.
  
  

• Meaning is imbedded in social relations, not in objects themselves.
• Weegee (Athur Fellig) "Booking a Suspect," (1937), "Their First Murder" (1936) and "Hells Kitchen". Looking at others looking. How does the image capture or convey emotion. Voyerism and the power of looking without being seen.
• Pietrer Claesz (Dutch), Still Life with Herring, Breakfast, Still Life with Herring, Wine, and Bread, Vanitas Still Life 1630)--objects that symbolized the vanity of worldly things and the brevity of life. The skull and bones refer to death, books and writing instruments to excessive pride through learning, and fragile glass goblet of wine to temporary pleasure. The golden cup on its side suggests immoderate wealth. Reflective obects often included distorted images of the artist.

•       We live in an age of reproduction: knowledge of most images is not first-hand.
•       We encounter millions of objects which are not unique.

•       Photograph's "aura of machine objectivity"
•       Do all images created through a camera lens involve some form/degree of subjective intervention?
•       Is there a truly objective or non-subjective photography?
•       Are some photographs more truthful?
•       What can we say of painterly truth or the truth of writing?
•       What is a document? A record?

Robert Frank: The Americans Trolley, New Orleans (1958)(comparison)

Robert Frank: Charleston, South Carolina (Photo of a black woman holding a white baby)

Woman on a Bus
Benetton ad with a woman nursing a baby

•       depth of field
•       range of light intensity and color
•       fstop and exposure
•       cropping
•       bracketed moments in time temporality
•       film stock--technology is a factor in the creation of meanings--technologies are cultural formations. Consider film density test patterns. (example 1; example 2;)
• Joseph Albers' Color theory Exercises: http://www.marilynfenn.com/color_study.html

•       Certain images become iconic (they become a type)--they carry an influential interpretive weight
•       Iconic images are those that becomes symbolic and suggest a universal meaning. But all icons can be read for their particular historical meanings.
•       The iconic image of the Madonna and child may affect our reading of contemporary images. Rahael, The Small Cowper Modanna (c 1505),
• Joos van Cleve, Virgin and Child (1515),
• Dorethea Lange, "Migrant Mother" (1936) #1, #2, #3, #4, #5,
• Benneton Advertisement woman with baby
•       Marilyn Monro, Andy Warhol, Marilyn Dyptich(1962)
•       Madonna (and "with child")
• Finally, one could argue that all images have an iconic register.
  

•       While the fine art object often is valued because it is unique, it also can be valued because it can be reproduced for popular consumption.
•       Museums and institutions such as universities affirm value.
•       Example: Van Gogh, Irises (1889) Irises (1888)(poster of the painting, costers, jar). Value and taste as a product of history, rarification, the interplay of interpretive, legal and economic factors. For example, the laws surrounding the establishment of museums as tax exempt institutions.  Or the policies regarding rights to publicity, copyright and privacy. (industry, mobility, color and images of the landscape)
•       Komar and Melamid's "Most Wanted Paintings"
• How do popular and expert tastes or preferences relate to economic value of cultural artifacts?
• In what ways does meaning relate to value?