Visual Communication Exam 1

Les Deux Mysterres (The Two Mysterys) (p. 21)

"This is not a pipe." A floating pipe appears like an apparition. One could not actually pick up and smoke this pipe; it is a representation, not a material object, and perhaps a fantasy. Magritte points out something so obvious as to render the written message "this is not a pipe" silly, if not absurd. He highlights the act of labeling as something we should think about. He asks us to consider how labels and images produce meaning yet cannot fully invoke the experience of the object, which always comes into view in a field of consciousness that includes fantasy and interpretation

Jacque Lacan

"mirror stage"; a psychoanalyst who built upon some of Freud's ideas in the late twentieth century, also critiqued the idea of the human subject as a unitary entity; According to Lacan, the human becomes a subject (develops a stable ego) during a self-recognition period in early development, between six and eighteen months of age. During this time, the growing baby comes to recognize itself in a mirror image, which may be the eyes of another (the mother, for example). This "mirror stage" is a decisive turning point in self-identity.

Edward Said

"orientalism," he emphasized "the Orient"

Mirror Stage

A stage of development, according to psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan, in which the infant first experiences a sense of alienation in its realization of its separateness from other human beings. According to Lacan, infants build their egos between six and eighteen months through the process of looking at a mirror body image, which may be their own mirror images, their mothers, or other figures and not necessarily a literal mirror image of their own bodies. They recognize the mirror image to be both themselves and different, yet as more whole and powerful. This split recognition forms the basis of their alienation at the same time that it pushes them to grow. The mirror phase is a useful 442 I GLOSSARY framework through which to understand the emotion and power invested by viewers in images as a kind of ideal form and has been used to theorize about film images in particular.

Connoisseur

A person who is particularly skilled at discerning quality. The term connoisseur is a class-based concept that has been traditionally used to refer to those with "discriminating" taste, that is, those of an upper-class status. The concept of connoisseurship has been criticized for representing upper-class taste as something that is natural, more authentic, more educated, and more discerning than popular taste.

High Brow vs. Low Brow Low Brow -- Low Intelligence

A phrase that hearkens back to the 19th-century scientific racism that interpreted the height of one's brow as an indication of one's intelligence

Signs

A semiotic term that describes the relationship between a vehicle of meaning, such as a word, image, or object, and its specific meaning in a particular context. In technical terms, this means the bringing together of signifier (word/image/ object) and signified (mental concept of the referent) to make a sign (meaning). It is important in semiotics to note that signifiers have different meanings in different contexts. For example, in a classical Hollywood film, a cigarette might signify friendship or romance, but in an anti-smoking ad it would signify disease and death.

Interpellation

A term coined by Marxist theorist Louis Althusser to describe the process by which ideological systems call out to or "hail" social subjects and tell them their place in the system. In popular culture, interpellation refers to the GLOSSARY I 439 ways that cultural products address their consumers and recruit them into a particular ideological position. Images can be said to designate the kind of viewer they intend us to be, and in speaking to us as that kind of viewer, they help to shape us as particular ideological subjects.

Epistemology

The branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge and what can be known. To ask an epistemological question about something is to investigate what we can know about it and how we know it.

Vision v. Visuality

The difference between vision and visuality contains "many differences" among how we see, how we are able, allowed, and made to see, and how we "see this seeing or the unseen therein." Visuality includes not only social codes about what can be seen and who is able and permitted to look, but also the construction of built environments in relation to these looking practices.

The Bath (p. 115)

The featuring of the body of the other in Western displays is prominent in paintings of the colonial period as well. A work by the French neoclassical painter Jean-Léon Gérôme is a case in point. The canvas offers a secretive glimpse into a bathhouse. Gérôme has placed the partially nude bodies of two women on display for the Western gaze. The class difference between them is made obvious: the black woman is a servant who bathes the white woman. The women are subject to different gaze dynamics as well. Whereas the white woman is rendered from behind, her face and breasts hidden from view, the black woman is rendered as a frontal nude, her face and breasts on display.

Counterhegemony

The forces in a given society that work against dominant meaning and power systems and keep those dominant meanings in constant tension and flux. Ex) upside down McDonald's "M" that says "Weight. I'm gaining it!"

Cultural Capital

The forms of cultural knowledge that give a person social advantages. Cultural capital can come in the form of rare taste, connoisseurship, and competence in deciphering cultural relations and artifacts. According to Bourdieu, it is accumulated through education, privileged family contexts, and long processes of inculcation. Today, valued cultural knowledge, which we may refer to as "cultural capital," is often found in youth culture and alternative forms such as street art (in which social mobility, political knowledge, and taste are not driven by wealth and class) rather than in high-culture institutions like museums.

Episteme

The ideas and ways of ordering knowledge that are taken as true and accurate in a given era. The term was used by Michel Foucault, in his book The Order of Things, to describe the dominant mode of organizing knowledge in a given period of history, the ground on which particular discourses can emerge in that time. Each period of history has a different episteme.

Spectator

the subject position of the individual who looks; starts to get us into tying in things like where we view

Subject

-Gets you closer to the idea of spectatorship and you are thinking about where someone is viewing from -A term, used in philosophy and psychoanalytic and cultural theory, that refers to the available ways of being for humans in a given time period or context. Historically, the subject is a concept that has shifted away from the notion of the unitary, autonomous self of liberal philosophy and the thinking, rational self that sits at the center of Cartesian philosophy. Rather, today we understand the subject to be more fragmented, less self-knowing, and understanding itself to be constituted through processes of splitting. To speak of individuals as subjects is to indicate that they are split between the conscious and unconscious, that they are produced as subjects not by being born alone and independent but through the structures of language and society, and that they are both active forces (subjects of history) and dependent on others and acted on by (subjected to) all the social forces of their moment in time.

Aesthetics

A branch of philosophy that is concerned with judgments of sentiment and taste. The term can also be used to mean the philosophy of art, which considers art's meaning and value in light of standards such as beauty and truth. Postmodern theorists questioned the universalizing claims of aesthetic judgment.

Hegemony

A concept most associated with Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci, who rethought how power works in traditional Marxist theories of ideology. He shifted his thinking away from ideas about false consciousness and passive social subjects and toward human subjects as active agents. There are two central aspects of Gramsci's definition of hegemony: that dominant ideologies are often offered as common sense and that dominant ideologies are in tension with other forces and hence constantly in flux. The term hegemony thus indicates how ideological meaning is an object of struggle rather than an oppressive force that fully dominates subjects from above.

Glance

to peer, to stare, to look up, or to look away; a quick look without intention

Dialectic

A term from philosophy whose use is varied and often ambiguous. In Greek philosophy, it referred to the dialogic process of question and answer as the means to higher knowledge. The term has generally been used to refer to a conflict or tension between two positions, for example, the dialectics of good and evil. However, its use in philosophy (the Hegelian dialectic) refers to this conflict as a dynamic that produces social relations and meaning as they are enacted and resolved. In Marxist theory, history moves forward not in a continuous progression but through a chain of conflicts that are resolved only to bring new conflicts. Marxism speaks in this respect of theses and antitheses, for example, an owner (thesis) and a worker (antithesis), whose antagonism leads to a synthesis through dialectical process.

Indexical Sign

A term in semiotics used by Charles Peirce to indicate those signs in which there is a physical causal connection between the signifier (word/image) and the thing signified, because both existed at some point within the same physical space. For example, smoke coming from a building is an index of a fire in that building. Similarly, an analog photograph is an index of its subject because it was taken in its presence. Peirce distinguished between iconic, indexical, and symbolic signs. o Ex) smoke of fire

Iconic Sign

A term in semiotics used by Charles Peirce to indicate those signs in which there is a resemblance between the signifier (word/image) and the thing signified. For example, a drawing of a person is an iconic sign because it resembles him or her. Peirce distinguished between iconic, indexical, and symbolic signs. -Ex) drawing of cat, marker

Symbolic Sign

A term in semiotics used by Charles Peirce to indicate those signs in which there is no connection between the signifier (word/image) and the thing signified except that imposed by convention. Language systems are primarily symbolic systems. Peirce distinguished iconic, indexical, and symbolic signs. For example, the word university does not physically resemble any actual university (in other words, it is not iconic), nor does it have a physical connection to the university (so it is not indexical), hence it is a symbolic sign. -Ex) flag

Orientalism

A term put forward by cultural theorist Edward Said that refers to the ways that Western cultures conceive of Eastern and Middle Eastern cultures as other and attribute to these cultures qualities such as exoticism and barbarism. Orientalism sees a binary opposition between the West (the Occident) and the East (the Orient) in which either negative or romanticized qualities are attributed to the latter. For Said, Orientalism is a practice found in cultural representations, education, social science, and political policy. For instance, the stereotype of Arab people as fanatic terrorists is an example of Orientalism.

Textual Poaching

A term used by French theorist Michel de Certeau to describe the ways that viewers can read and interpret cultural texts, such as film or television, to rework those texts in some way. This might involve rethinking the story of a particular film or, in the case of some fan cultures, writing one's own version of it. Textual poaching was defined by de Certeau as a process analogous to "inhabiting a text like a rented apartment." In other words, viewers of popular culture can "inhabit" that text by renegotiating its meaning or by creating new cultural products in response to it.

Myth (based on Barthes)

A term used by French theorist Roland Barthes to refer to the ideological meaning of a sign that is expressed through connotation. According to Barthes, myth is the hidden set of rules, codes, and conventions through which meanings, which are in reality specific to certain groups, are rendered universal and given for a whole society. Myth allows the connotative meaning of a particular thing or image to appear to be denotative, hence literal or natural. In Barthes's famous example, an image in a popular magazine of a black soldier saluting the French flag produces the message that France is a great empire in which all young men regardless of their color faithfully serve under its flag. For Barthes, this image affirms the allegiance of French colonial subjects at the level of myth, erasing evidence of resistance. Myths are a subset of ideology. · The myth that the author creates. There's also a myth that we are often asked to buy into when we look at an image. -Ex) Boy saluting, we assume there is a French flag. We are asked to buy into the idea that the people support the French colonies. -Ex) Iwo Jima - there are some expectations that we buy into, are they right or not?

The Other

A term used to refer to the category of subjectivity that is set up in binary opposition to the dominant subject category in a culture. The Other refers to that which is understood as the symbolic opposite to the normative category. The slave is other to the master, the woman other to the man, the black person other to the white person, and so forth. The category of person marked as other is disempowered through this opposition. The concept of the Other has been taken up by various theorists, including Edward Said, in his book Orientalism, to describe the psychological dynamic of power that allows those who occupy a position of Western dominance to imagine a racial or ethnic Other, against whom he or she may more clearly elaborate his or her own (Western) self. The function of the Other, in Western thinking, is to serve as a foil against which the dominant subject may better know and understand himself as the center of knowledge and experience. In Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, we have another interpretation of the Other. The mother is the original mirror-like Other through whom the child begins to understand him- or herself as an autonomous individual, even prior to the child's actual physical ability to be autonomous. The Other is the figure through whom the child, between the ages of nine and sixteen months, misrecognizes itself as a unified and autonomous individual.

Semiotics

A theory of signs, sometimes called semiology, concerned with the ways in which things (words, images, and objects) are vehicles for meaning. Semiotics is a tool for analyzing the signs of a particular culture and how meaning is produced within a particular cultural context. Just as languages communicate through words organized into sentences, other practices in a culture are treated by semiotic theory as languages made up of basic elements and the rules for combining them. The two originators of semiotics are the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure at the beginning of the twentieth century and the American philosopher Charles Peirce in the nineteenth century. Contemporary applications of semiotics follow from the work of French theorists Roland Barthes and Christian Metz and Italian theorist Umberto Eco in the 1960s. Their work provides important tools for understanding cultural products (images, film, television, clothing, etc.) as signs that can be decoded. Roland Barthes used a system of signifier (word/ image/object) and signified (meaning) as the two elements of a sign. Charles Peirce used the term interpretant to designate the meaning that a sign produces in the mind of the person. Peirce also divided signs into several categories, including indexical, iconic, and symbolic signs. Semiotics is central to understanding culture as a signifying practice that is the work of creating and interpreting meaning on a daily basis in a given culture.

Death of the Author

According to Barthes, there is no one ultimate authorial meaning or intention in a work for readers to uncover. The notion of the single, individual author is no longer "alive" in the work of reading cultural texts, which are strongly influenced by context. We can adapt Barthes's concept of the disappearance of the author as an authority on a text's meaning to consider questions of power as they are enacted between viewers and producers of images and media texts. Although works may convey dominant meanings, it is the job of the critical reader not to simply find and point out dominant meanings to others, but to show how these meanings are created through their various contexts. Any given text is open to meanings and interpretations that exist alongside and even against more obvious or intended meanings. Barthes suggests that a reader (and a viewer) must be analytic and critical and use interpretive practices grounded in the historical and cultural contexts of a given text or image. He states that it is a myth that the author is the primary producer of the text's meaning. Rather, images and media texts' meanings are produced through viewers' interpretation and negotiations rather than the author's or producer's intent.

Counter visuality

According to Mirzoeff, counter-visuality is about the struggle for "the right to look," which is as much about a claim to autonomy as it is about a right to see, look, and challenge the power of visuality. Viewing an image counter to the norm, challenging the image Ex) #notabugsplat

Kitsch

Art or literature judged to have little or no aesthetic value, yet that has value precisely because of its status in evoking the class standards of bad taste or simple sentimentalism. Aficionados of kitsch thus recode kitsch objects, such as lava lamps and tacky 1950s suburban furniture, as good rather than bad taste. Kitsch can also refer to cultural objects and images that interpellate viewers in easy codes of sentimentalism, sometimes for political propaganda. -Ex) Dogs around poker table drinking beer -Ex) American girl dolls -Ex) Waving Chinese cat

Modern Times (p. 100) Film

Charlie Chaplin's 1936 film Modern Times comments on modernity and industrialization's impact on the everyday worker. Chaplin used physical comedy to highlight how alienation is pro-duced through industrial mechanization and surveillance. At work in the film's vast factory, Chaplin is swallowed up by the machine he oper-ates. He is a hapless victim of modernity's new autonomous technology (a con-cept we discuss further in Chapter 5). In his trademark role as the tramp, Chaplin attempts to retain his humanity by fighting back against the machine. The uncar-ing and technocratic factory bosses blithely speed up the machines. The tramp is subject to a ridiculous number of automated machines, including a feeding device hawked by the voice of a "mechanical salesman." "Don't stop for lunch," the voice suggests. "Be ahead of your competitor" by machine-feeding your employ-ees while they work. This scene follows a lunch break in which Chaplin's body is so caught up in the machine process that his muscles keep on jerking mechani-cally after he leaves the assembly line and he spills a bowl of soup. Chaplin uses humor to critique the industrial workplace's inhumanity: by extracting his or her labor, the factory destroys the autonomous individual, but it also produces a new kind of human subject, one who is inextricable from the capitalist machine.

Orientalism is an ongoing ideology that can be found not only in political policy but also in cultural representations. One example of colonial representation is the public expositions staged in Europe and the United States described earlier, the vast fairs displaying objects and designs from colonies, tribes, and protectorates. Contemporary representation of Muslims as fanatics or extremists and the representation of the Middle East as mysterious, unknowable, and sensual are examples of how current Orientalism reinforces cultural stereotypes that have their roots in the colonial era. The lack of representation of women artists in art museums and markets (and their overrepresentation as nudes in paintings) has been a target of the Guerrilla Girls, a feminist activist art group. We can see changing norms of representation of male sexuality and gender identity in brand culture as well. Since the 1980s, the Calvin Klein brand has produced numerous print campaigns challenging conventions of male sexual representation. Calvin Klein began to experiment with homoerotic codes during the 1990s, when some of its advertisements put the muscular male body on display using the conventions of black-and-white nude art photography. Ex) 1992 B&W Calvin Klein ad with Mark Wahlberg and Kate Moss (Men depicted as masculine objects of the sexualized gaze) Ex) 2015 B&W Calvin Klein ad with Justin Bieber and Lara Stone (Bieber's body is on display as an object & Lara Stone seems to serve as a kind of prop, her body hidden behind Bieber's muscled torso and tattoos command the look - he is the object of the gaze & retains power)

How can representation of groups change us as viewers?

In the art market, the value of a work of art is determined by economic factors, such as the role played by collecting in global capital, and cultural factors, including the valuing of artists through galleries, museums, and auction houses. The collecting of art by wealthy, private collectors and by institutions supported through private philanthropy has long been central to the valuing of art. Not only does collecting create a market for art to be traded, it also creates a financial context in which work can be acquired and held in hopes that it will appreciate over time. The art market hinges on investment strategies, which rely on knowledge and predictions of changes in taste and aesthetic value. Ownership is a key factor in establishing art's value and in establishing a nation's political importance as well as an individual's stature. Beliefs about a work's authenticity and uniqueness, as well as about its aesthetic style, contribute to its value.

How do we assign value to "art"?

Modernity's changes thus brought transformation on a global scale. These changes were not uniform. Technological change imposed on non-Western countries undermined indigenous ways of living, and modern colonialists extracted both natural resources and artisanal goods for Western markets. Industrialization in the West generated excitement and desire. Migration was spurred by the lure of industrial jobs and goods. But early factories were dangerous places to work, as are many contemporary factories. And the new industrial cities could be alienating places to live. As Marxist historians of consumption have noted, wage labor produced alienation in workers for whom activity was reduced to repetitive machine-like tasks. Once on the market, products took on meaning through a commodity culture in which factory workers were further alienated, insofar as they paradoxically could neither afford nor rightfully claim as their own creation the mass-manufactured goods they made. Workers sought escape in a new leisure culture that included movie theaters designed for the mass consumption of cheap amusements. New architectural forms included tenement houses (cheap apartment buildings) and settlement houses (charity institutions for new immigrants), structures that quickly rose up around factories to accommodate the fast-growing population of workers. One popular tenement design was the "railroad flat" or "floor-through apartment," in which an apartment's rooms were strung together like railroad cars, eliminating the need for hallway space, as seen in this Lewis Hine photograph taken in lower Manhattan in 1911. Windows were installed between interior rooms not for pleasure but to increase airflow in order to curb the spread of tuberculosis and influenza, which proliferated in the crowded, airless spaces of tenements and factories. In the twenty-first century, we have come to recognize the long-term social and environmental impacts of industrial and technological advancement in the age of modernity. This concern is evident in contemporary discussions of climate change and the Anthropocene, the interval of geologic time in which humans profoundly and irreversibly impacted the earth. During modernity, how-ever, industrialization and consumption were viewed as signs of progress, not environmental problems. The nineteenth-century political economist Karl Marx criticized industrial capitalism for its economic exploitation and social alien-ation of workers, but he did not predict the impact industrial development would have on the larger ecosystem. That impact became the subject of later critiques, such as that of Rachel Carson, the renowned American marine biolo-gist who wrote prize-winning books about nature that were popular bestsellers. In her third book, Silent Spring (1962), Carson warned of pesticides' invisible but deadly effects on human and animal life, questioning the risks of scientific progress and calling for conservation and regulatory measures. In discussing the nineteenth-century cityscape now, it is important to recognize the optimistic modern fervor about technology centered on human improvement. Lewis Hine, the photographer who documented how poor, immigrant workers lived, criticized the social impact of industrialism on human life, but he did not make note of the broader environmental impacts. Nineteenth-century life was organized around industrial growth, regarded as essential to progress. Increasing numbers of people moved from agricultural regions to cities, traveling on modern mass transit systems (such as trolleys, trains, subways, and trams) and working and living in crowded spaces. The built environment of the industrial city was a key signifier of this new form of urban experience.

How does Modernism break with the Renaissance/Enlightenment view of industrialization?

One way that value is communicated is through display. In some cases, we know a work of art is important because it is encased in a gilded frame and placed behind barriers. We might assume that a work of art is valuable simply because it is so carefully displayed in a prestigious museum, as is the case with Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, which is displayed in a gold frame in a climate-controlled room behind bulletproof glass to protect it from weather and potential vandals among the 6 million people who view it annually. The painting is valued because it is unique, but also because it is highly marketable and reproducible.

How does where something is displayed change how people interpret a visual?

Vision can be a form of power because of who controls what we see and what is appropriate to show. The ability to see is also a form of power The ability to make decision about what we view. Ex) Mamie Till's decision to make the image of Emmitt Till publicized.

How is vision power?

Taste

In cultural theory, taste refers to the shared artistic and cultural values of a particular social community or individual. However, even when it seems most individually specific, taste is informed by experiences relating to one's class, cultural background, education, and other aspects of identity. Notions of good taste usually refer to middle-class or upper-class notions of what is tasteful, and bad taste is a term often associated with mass or low culture. Taste, in this understanding, is something that can be learned through contact with cultural institutions.

Modernism

In literature, architecture, art, and film, modernism refers to a set of styles that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that question traditions and conventions of representation (such as pictorialism, decoration and the concealment of form, narrative structure, and illusionism) in writing, architecture, and the arts. Modernists emphasized and exposed the materiality of form, the conditions of production (equipment, structural elements) so often covered over in works of culture, and the role of the author or artist as producer embedded in the material conditions of the economic and physical world. Most modernist movements shared the general principles of breaking with past conventions of narrative and pictorial realism, foregrounding form over content, and drawing attention to structure and function. Postmodernists and poststructuralists questioned this assumption that we can know the world by ascertaining its systems and structures. ·The idea of trying to refine things to their purest form -Ex) thinking about function over form ·Late 19th century which really picks up after WWI, there is a rejection of the status quo & part of that rejection is colonialism. Do Europeans have it right? ·Rejection of colonialism

Signified

In semiotic terms, the meaning that together with the signifier (object/ image/word) makes the sign. For instance, the signified of a smiley face is happiness, which in combination with the image of a smiley face constitutes the sign smile equals happiness.

Signifier

In semiotic terms, the word, image, or object within a sign that conveys meaning. For example, in an advertisement for sports shoes, an inner-city basketball court is a signifier of authenticity, skill, and coolness. The relationship of a signifier and a signified together forms a sign. Semiotic theory often refers to a free-floating signifier, by which it means a signifier whose sense is not fixed and that can vary a great deal from context to context.

Denotative Meaning

In semiotics, the literal, face-value meaning of a sign. The ___________________________ of a picture of a rose is a flower. However, in any given context, a rose image is likely to have connotative meanings (such as romanticism, love, or loyalty) that add social, historical, and cultural (connotative) meaning to its __________________________.

Connotative Meaning

In semiotics, the social, cultural, and historical meanings that are added to a sign's literal meaning. They rely on the cultural and historical context of the image and its viewers' lived, felt knowledge of those circumstances. Connotation brings to an object or image the wider realm of ideology, cultural meaning, and value systems of a society. Ex) Peace is a ______________________ of the image of a dove, a meaning that is socially and culturally specific, not natural.

Las Meninas (p. 106-107)

Las Meninas depicts a room in the palace of the king of the era's most powerful empire. The composition shows five of the room's planes, including floor and ceiling. Paintings cover two walls. The figure standing before a canvas (fig. 312a) is believed to be the artist Velázquez himself, at work on the very painting we are viewing. At the very center of the composition stands the princess, the Infanta Margarita. The attendants, the "meninas" of the title, hover by Margarita's side, looking at and reaching toward her. Their gestures and gazes lead our eyes to her as does her bright white dress (fig. 3.12b). Yet can the painter Velázquez really be so concerned about painting her? We see him looking not at her, but with her, at something or someone outside the painting's frame. Behind the princess, the composition is split. On one side appears a door frame out of which leads a stairwell on which a figure is taking leave. Carpetbag in hand, he pauses to look back (at the room? the painter? us?). Next to this door hangs a mirror, in which are reflected two figures: the royal couple (fig. 3.12c). The king and queen face outward, like Velázquez and Margarita, toward the viewer. But because this is a mirror we can presume that they in fact stand before this scene in the same position before the painting that we are made to occupy as spectators by its composition. They do not look out at us at all; in fact, their gaze is mirrored back, and so perhaps by proxy we stand in their place. We might say the painting structurally thrusts the viewer into the place of the king and queen, node of power in this network of looks. But many scholars, including Foucault, have debated the painting's organization of its various viewpoints in relation to the implied spectator position. In his book The Order of Things, Foucault discusses the spectator in relationship not only to the royal couple's implied standpoint but also to the looks of the painter and the child.17 Does the painting's discourse of looks really position the spectator at the front of the room with the king and queen? In fact, the painting was viewed for many years only in the king's chambers. Might we imagine our gaze to be returned in the figure of the man who looks upon the scene through the back door as he flees? Does his departure suggest that this system is not closed, that there is a world outside of the monarchy—and outside the painting system, with its formerly unitary spectator position? Another way of understanding this painting is that Velázquez inserts himself to hijack the royal portraiture tradition. As Jason Forago writes, by putting himself within the image looking out, the painter "photobombs" the image, disrupting the circuit of power that otherwise draws all eyes to the princess.

Post Modernity

Postmodernity is a term used to capture life during a period marked by radical transformation of the social, economic, and political aspects of modernity, marked by the flows of migration and global travel, the flow of information through the Internet and new digital technologies, the dissolution of nation-states in their traditional sovereign form in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the demise of the Cold War, as well as the expansion of trade liberalization, and the increased divide between rich and poor. It describes a set of social, cultural, and economic formations that have occurred "post" or after the height of modernity and that have produced both a different worldview and different ways of being in the world than was the case in modernity. It has been referred to as a period of questioning of "metanarratives" by French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard and of the premise that unified accounts and theories could adequately explain the human condition. It has also been described by Fredric Jameson as a historical period that is the cultural outcome of the "logic of late capitalism.

Appropriation

The act of borrowing, stealing, or taking over others' works, images, words, or meanings to one's own ends. Cultural appropriation is the process of borrowing and changing the meaning of commodities, cultural products, slogans, images, or elements of fashion by putting them into a new context or in juxtaposition with new elements. Appropriation is one of the primary forms of oppositional production and reading, when, for instance, viewers take cultural products and re-edit, rewrite, or change them, or change their meaning or use.

Emmett Till (p. 16)

The image of Emmett Till shows the body of Emmett Till in a glass-sealed casket on view to 50,000 mourners at the Roberts Temple Church of God, Chicago. Emmett Till was a 14-year-old boy from Chicago who was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered by 2 white men in a rural Mississippi town when he was visiting relatives. Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam abducted Till from his uncle's home, beat him, and forced him to carry a 75 lb. cotton-gin fan to the banks of the Tallahatchie River, where they bound the fan to his neck with barbed wire and threw his body in the river. They did this because he supposedly flirted with a white woman - Bryant's wife. Local authorities wanted to bury the body quickly, but his mother insisted on an open-casket funeral so that the public could bear witness. She let him be photographed by the press so everyone could see the gruesome evidence of violence exacted upon a child. Bryant & Milam were acquitted on the basis of the claim that the body was too mutilated to identify. The photo provides evidence of systematic violence and injustice. Mamie Till used it to call people to action.

Polar bears (p. 42) - think in terms of image icons.

The polar bear has become a ubiquitous icon of climate change. The melting ice in this image is a signifier of climate change and the clinging polar bear a signifier of endangerment to life caused by a warming climate. The endangered polar bear is a key signifier of the larger array of problems caused by earth's climate getting warmer. Images like these are signs of the global distress and threats to life posed by climate change.

Bricolage

The practice of working with whatever materials are at hand, "making do" with what one has. As a cultural practice, bricolage was used by Dick Hebdige to refer to the activity of taking familiar or discarded commodities and making them one's own by giving them new meaning, sometimes to create oppositional meanings out of familiar things. The punk practice of turning everyday, utilitarian safety pins into clothing and body ornaments is an example of bricolage.

Colonialism

The process of a nation extending its power over another nation, people, or territory to render them a colony. The term is used primarily to describe the colonization by European countries of Africa, India, Latin and North America, and the Pacific region from the sixteenth century through the middle of the twentieth century, when decolonial struggles and wars for independence produced the conditions of postcolonialism, though many colonies still exist today. Colonization was motivated by the potential exploitation of one nation's resources and labor by another and involved both the conquest of countries politically and economically and the restructuring of the culture of the colonized, with enforced changes in language and values, among other things.

Ideology

The shared set of values and beliefs that exist within a given society and through which individuals live out their relations to social institutions and structures. Ideology refers to the way that certain concepts and values are made to seem like natural, inevitable aspects of everyday life. In Marxist theory, the term ideology has undergone several changes in definition: first, by Marx, to imply a social system in which the masses are instilled with the dominant ideology of the ruling class and that constitutes a kind of false consciousness; second, by French Marxist Louis Althusser, who combined psychoanalysis and Marxist theory to postulate that we are unconsciously constituted as subjects by ideology, which gives us a sense of our place in the world; third, by Antonio Gramsci, who used the term hegemony to describe how dominant ideologies are always in flux and under contestation from other ideas and values.

Ralph Lauren Advertisement (p. 117)

The trope of the white woman in an exotic setting with non-Western women as props, as a fantasy of colonial-era travel, is also still pervasive in advertising. Ralph Lauren has sold its Safari clothing line for decades using colonial imagery. In an advertisement photographed by Bruce Weber, nineteen-year-old Sanne Vloet, a Nordic model with blonde hair and blue-green eyes, appears on a sandy beach in a khaki gown styled like a classic safari shirt. Real camels complement her camel-colored hair and dress. These animals serve as "Arab"-themed accessories, a reference suggested as well by the beach canopy, which is printed in a pattern that suggests mosque domes. Why a Nordic model in an Arab-themed setting in 2015? This strategy of mining symbolism of the Middle East as a source of otherness has become even more pervasive in the twenty-first century.

Barthes suggests that a reader (and a viewer) must be analytic and critical and use interpretive practices grounded in the historical and cultural contexts of a given text or image. He states that it is a myth that the author is the primary producer of the text's meaning. Rather, images and media texts' meanings are produced through viewers' interpretation and negotiations rather than the author's or producer's intent. This gets into the idea of the death of the author. It doesn't matter what the artist says it means. What matters is the meaning that we as viewers give it. An example of this is the image of the top of the twin towers. The meaning we give that picture now is very different from its original meaning, which was before 9/11.

What does Barthe mean when he says "it is a myth that the author is the primary producer of a text's meaning?"

World Wild Life Fund (p. 33)

This image is a 2008 ad from the World Wildlife Fund. It illustrates how an image's meaning is often derived from a combination of signs. In this photo, the image of trees in the shape of a lung constructs a message about deforestation that combines several signs to create a visual impact. The lush, green quality of the meadows and trees signifies aliveness, fertility, and life, and the shape of the tress will be read by most viewers as evoking the shape of the human lungs. The combination of these signs, forest as life and forest as lungs, makes a connection between the trees and the capacity of the planet to breathe. Yet, the message is derived from the brown section of the "lung" of the trees on the right, which depicts deforestation and, as a consequence, a loss of the carbon dioxide - reducing trees that keep the atmosphere at an equilibrium. It contains a short tagline, "Before it's too late," but the image itself has already conveyed the sense of time running out, since, by implication, the brown area of the forest lung will overtake the healthy green sections.

Paris Match Cover (p. 30)

This image is the cover of a magazine and is a close-up of the face of an African boy in a French military uniform, who is saluting. The caption reads: "The nights of the army. Little Diouf has come from Ouagadougou with his comrades, children reared by the A.O.F (French West African) army to open the fantastic spectacle that the French Army presents this week at the Palais des Sports." Barthes proposes that the image is not just a boy saluting, but it engages in and amplifies a larger myth about the universal greatness of French nationalism and colonial imperialism. The boy's eyes are uplifted, suggesting he's saluting the French flag flying above, which is the basic meaning of the picture. The connotative meaning is the idea "that France is a great Empire, that all her sons, without any color discrimination, faithfully serve under her flag, and that there's no better answer to the detractors of an alleged colonialism than the zeal shown by this Negro in serving his so-called oppressors. This connotated message, Barthes proposes, is targeted at a French reader, in whom the photograph will foster the feeling that French imperialism and paternalism in Africa are natural, given conditions and not the outcomes of contestation and historical power struggles.

Mirgant Mother (p. 46)

This photo depicts a woman, also a mother, during the California migration of the 1930s. This photograph is an iconic image of the Great Depression, and it evokes the despair and perseverance of those who survived the hardships of that time. The image gains much of its meaning from its implicit reference to the history of artistic depictions of women and their children, such as Madonna and child images, and its difference from them. The mother is anxious & distracted, and the children cling to her and burden her thin frame. She is not looking at her children, but outward to the future with little promise. The image derives its meaning largely from a viewer's knowledge of the historical moment it represents while making a statement about the complex role of motherhood that is informed by its place in the iconic tradition. Dorothea Lange was the photographer & she took 5 pictures of the woman and her children. Later, the woman in the picture's name was revealed as Florence Thomson.

Dead Confederate Soldier in the Devil's Den (p. 26)

This picture represents the "myth of photographic truth." Gardner presented this photograph as a scene he encountered. It was later suspected that the gun at the sharpshooter's side was Gardner's own, which he apparently placed there for dramatic effect after dragging the soldier's corpse into the setting that he labeled "the Devil's den," propping up the dead man's face to make its features visible to the camera.

Modernist architects embraced form and function, rejecting what they regarded as a bourgeois tendency toward embellishment. After World War I, the architect Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus (which translates as the house of construction or school of building) to design housing for the new German citizen of the interwar period, prior to Nazism's rise. Gropius and his colleagues tried to make thoughtful designs for affordable and practical furniture and housewares for the everyday working person. At the Bauhaus, artists, designers, and artisans were invited to take up residence alongside one another to promote the flow of ideas among art, craft, and industry. Bauhaus furniture design is distinctively spare, using relatively inexpensive, newly available industrial materials such as plastics and steel rather than traditional materials such as wood, and dispensing with traditional decoration. These designs are unadorned, reduced to the look and feel needed for optimal function. Yet Bauhaus designs are not exactly without aesthetic elements—rather, the aesthetic, which is quite distinctive, reflects keen appreciation of function. Consider the spare, sleek Cesca chair designed by Marcel Breuer, director of the Bauhaus cabinetmaking workshop. This chair is still produced by Knoll (a company that became famous for its mid-century office furniture) and sold by outlets, including Design Within Reach, which in 1999 began marketing reproductions of modern designs. The Design Within Reach website is filled with quotes like this one from Breuer: "Mass production made me interested in polished metal, in shiny and impeccable lines in space, as new components of our interiors. I considered such polished and curved lines not only symbolic of our modern technology but actually to be technology." The chair's frame is made of a material that at the time had been used only in industry. Light and aerodynamic, it looks like bicycle handlebars.

What does it mean that "modernist architects embraced form and function?"

The anti-McDonald's images we looked at in class

Upside down "M" makes a "W" and says: "Weight. I'm gainin' it!"

Images generate meanings, yet the meanings of a work of art, a photograph, or a media text do not, strictly speaking, lie in the work itself, as if placed there by the image's producer for viewers to find. Rather, these meanings are produced through complex negotiations between viewers and image texts; they are shaped by the social practices through which images are interpreted, shared, and produced. This meaning production involves at least three elements besides the image itself and its producer: codes and conventions that structure the image, which cannot be separated from the image's content; viewers and how they interpret or experience the image; and exhibition and viewing context (which includes geographic and national location, time period, institutional setting, cultural and/or religious framework, and more). Although images may have dominant or primary meanings, viewers may interpret and use them in ways that do not conform to these meanings. Throughout this book, we use the term viewer rather than audience. A viewer is, in the most basic sense of the term, a person who looks. An audience is, by definition, a group of lookers/listeners; the term is often used to describe the consumer group that forms around a given commodity (viewers of a television show make up its audience, for example). In focusing on the concept of the viewer, we highlight an individual's activity, which we understand to be situated in a network of social practices. These practices are enacted not simply between individual human subjects who look and are looked at, but also among people, objects, and technologies in social places and spaces. Viewing, even for an individual subject, is a multimodal activity. The elements that come into play when we look include not only the images we are looking directly at but also other images with which they are displayed or published, our own bodies, other bodies, built and natural objects, technology and equipment, institutions, private or "natural" places, and the social practices and techniques through which we engage in looking. Viewing is a relational and social practice whether one looks in private or in public and whether the image is personal (a photograph of a loved one), technical (a medical image used for diagnosis in a hospital), or public (a work of photojournalism).

What do they mean by viewers make meaning?

In his well-known essay, "What Do Pictures Want?," W. J. T. Mitchell writes that this poster helps us to think about how pictures have a kind of agency and can make demands of viewers. Thus, according to Mitchell, we should ask, "What does this picture want?" rather than "What does it do?" This approach allows us to think about pictures as sites where desire and power are negotiated, rather than as sheer manipulation or propaganda.2 This picture wants young men to enlist in the army and wants them to be willing to die for the nation, yet, as we note, the viewer may resist this demand.

What do we mean by "what does an image want from us/ask of us?"

The "myth of photographic truth" began to arise with special urgency once digital imaging technology started to become popular. At the beginning of the digital era, the idea of manipulating images became a huge debate. According to the textbook, photographic truth is the "concept that photographs tend to be more closely affiliated with truth than, say, drawings, or paintings, because the camera is present at the event recorded, which eliminates some of the subjective bias of the human eye and hand." On the other hand, the "myth of photographic truth" means that a photograph can often be inaccurately perceived, and photographers can use programs, like Photoshop, to fabricate reality by manipulating images. Even analog photos were altered to manipulate truth and history. One example of this from the textbook is when Dutch graphic designer Zilla van den Born explored this idea of manipulation for a school project and spent 5 weeks on a "vacation" in Asia. While it appeared as though Zilla van den Born was enjoying tourist scenes, group shots, and beach scenes on social media, she was actually at home using Photoshop to edit photos and make them appear as if she was there. Zilla van den Born went as far as Skyping friends and family with fake backgrounds and sending fake postcards. After her 5-week "vacation" ended, she explained to her family and friends what she had done and titled her project Sjezus zeg, Zilla, or "Oh God, Zilla.". Zilla van den Born stated, "My goal was to prove how common and easy it is to distort reality. I did this to show people that we filter and manipulate what we show on social media." Images can "lie" by being photoshopped, not showing the entire scene, or they could be posed.

What do we mean by the myth of photographic truth and why is it important? (Think about different ways images can "lie")

The French theorist Roland Barthes addressed these questions of authority and power in his 1967 essay "The Death of the Author."3 According to Barthes, there is no one ultimate authorial meaning or intention in a work for readers to uncover. The notion of the single, individual author is no longer "alive" in the work of reading cultural texts, which are strongly influenced by context. We can adapt Barthes's concept of the disappearance of the author as an authority on a text's meaning to consider questions of power as they are enacted between viewers and producers of images and media texts. Although works may convey dominant meanings, it is the job of the critical reader not to simply find and point out dominant meanings to others, but to show how these meanings are created through their various contexts. Any given text is open to meanings and interpretations that exist alongside and even against more obvious or intended meanings. Barthes suggests that a reader (and a viewer) must be analytic and critical and use interpretive practices grounded in the historical and cultural contexts of a given text or image. He states that it is a myth that the author is the primary producer of the text's meaning. Rather, images and media texts' meanings are produced through viewers' interpretation and negotiations rather than the author's or producer's intent.

What is the Death of the Author?

When we look at an image, we have a set of cultural assumptions we bring. In the Iwo Jima picture, I have loved ones in the military so the image makes me feel one way that might be different from someone in China. Your experiences and how you were raised affects how you view things.

What is the role of culture and assumptions that viewers bring to visuals?

Visuality

a concept that refers to the ways that vision is shaped through social context and interaction

Audience

a group of lookers/listeners; the term is often used to describe to a consumer group that forms around a given commodity; a group of viewers

Gaze

a kind look that involves fixation and intentionality; more powerful

Viewer

a person who looks/views

Connotation

a primary means through which images convey values

Roland Barthes

created the idea of "Death of the Author" and used the term "studium" to describe the function of the photograph

Antonio Gramsci

created the idea of "hegemony"

Laura Mulvey

created the idea of the male gaze; wrote the essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," where she proposed that the form of classical Hollywood narrative cinema situates male viewers in an active position of dominant looking, relegating women to the passive role of image and object of that gaze

Louis Althusser

created the theory of "interpellation"

Rene Magritte

artist of "Les Deux Mysteres" (The Two Mysteries)

Jeremy Bentham

designed the panopticon prison structure

Diego Velasquez

pained "Las Meninas," which situates its "external spectator"

Dorthea Lange

photographer of "Migrant Mother"

Vision

refers to the physical capacity to see

Cultural Appropriation

the process of "borrowing" and changing the meaning of cultural products, slogans, images, or elements of fashion -Ex) American Gothic & American Gothic, Washington D.C.

Representation

· A term in psychoanalytic theory that refers to the process by which the individual relegates to and keeps within the unconscious those particular thoughts, feelings, memories, or desires that are too difficult or socially inappropriate to deal with. Freud postulated that we repress that which produces fear, anxiety, shame, or other negative emotions within us and that this repression is active and ongoing. He felt that it was only through this repression that we become functioning and normative members of a society. The "talking cure" of psychoanalysis is intended to help release that which is repressed in the neurotic person. Michel Foucault offered another approach, in which he argued against the idea that these desires are hidden and go unexpressed in everyday life. Foucault wrote that systems of control are indirectly productive rather than fully repressive. By this, he meant that social structures encourage such desires to be expressed, spoken, and rendered visible in indirect ways, thereby allowing them to be named, known, and regulated. For example, in a Foucaultian approach, talk shows in which people confess their bad behavior and secret wishes would be seen as a context in which desires can be witnessed, cataloged, and controlled.

Modernity

· Modernity refers to the time period and worldview beginning approximately in the eighteenth century with the Enlightenment, and reaching its height in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when broad populations in Europe and North America were increasingly concentrated in urban centers and in industrial societies of increased mechanization and automation. Modernity was a time of colonialism as well as dramatic technological changes. A linear view of progress toward humankind's prosperity and an optimistic view of the future dominated. At the same time, modernity embodied an anxiety about change and social upheaval.

Post Modernism

·Postmodernism has been characterized as a critique of modernist concepts such as universalism, the idea of presence, the traditional notion of the subject as unified and self-aware, and faith in progress. Postmodernism is often understood as existing in the detritus of modernity. The concept is also used to describe particular styles in art, literature, architecture, and popular culture that engage in parody, bricolage, appropriation, and ironic reflexivity, as if there is nothing truly new to say, no ultimate knowledge to reveal. In terms of its application to art and visual style, postmodernism is a set of trends in the art world in the late twentieth century that question, among other things, concepts of authenticity, authorship, and the idea of style progression. Postmodern works are thus highly reflexive, with a mix of styles. In popular culture and advertising, the term postmodern has been used to describe techniques that involve reflexivity, discontinuity, and pastiche and that speak to viewers as both jaded consumers and through self-knowing metacommunication. ·The rejection of modernism and part of the idea is that there's nothing new ·Pop-culture (Simpson's, Family Guy)

American Gothic (p. 82 and p. 83)

·Artists seeking to oppose dominant ideology have used cultural appropriation quite effectively. This 1942 photograph by Gordon Parks, American Gothic, Washington, D.C., makes an intertextual statement by referring to Grant Wood's American Gothic, a well-known 1930 painting that depicts a white American man and woman holding a pitchfork before a classic wooden farmhouse. ·An iconic image, American Gothic has been the source of innumerable appropriations and remakes, some interpreting the painting as a sly critique and some making humorous commentaries on changing social values in the United States. Taken before the civil rights movement, Parks's photograph is a bitter commentary on the discrepancy between the meanings of the two works. The house that is the backdrop in the original painting is replaced by an American flag, and the white couple holding a pitchfork is replaced by a single black woman, named Ella Watson, holding a mop and a broom. The codes of Puritan family ethics connoted in the original American Gothic icon suggest that hard work will lead to proud ownership of a home, a badge of American belonging. But the black woman stands alone, a domestic who is paid to clean property she probably cannot afford to own in the segregated society of the 1940s. Ironically, she does not have the freedoms and opportunities that the American flag behind her symbolizes. By playing off the codes of the original American Gothic using a strategy that Henry Louis Gates has called "intertextual irony," Parks points to the fact that not all Americans are interpellated by the painting's mythic image of American values. As Steven Biel writes, Parks ensures that "the normative whiteness of the now iconic American Gothic did not go unrecognized and unchallenged."21 It is precisely the strategies of appropriation and bricolage that allow Parks's image to make a statement about social exclusion and inequality. ·In this first image, as in most Euro-American representations, whiteness is the unmarked category, defined as the norm and hence unremarkable. Parks's American Gothic marks race and in the process makes the viewer think back on the whiteness of the original painting. The remake heightens the meaning of the appropriation through its implied comparison.

Image Icon

·In its contemporary meaning, an icon is an image (or person) that refers to something beyond its individual components, something (or someone) that acquires symbolic significance. Icons are often perceived to represent universal concepts, emotions, and meanings. ·Thus an image produced in a specific culture, time, and place might be interpreted as having broader meaning and the capacity to evoke similar responses across all cultures and in all viewers. -Ex) The polar bear has become a ubiquitous icon of climate change. -Ex) Jeff Widener, Tank Man (aka Unknown Protester) -Ex) Migrant Mother -Ex) Napalm Girl

iRaq (p. 84)

·In the early protests against the U.S.-led war in Iraq, the street was an import-ant political site. In 2004, an anonymous artist collective in New York, going by the name Copper Greene, made posters in which they appropriated a popular iPod advertising campaign to comment on revelations of torture committed by U.S. soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. ·Copper Greene (which took its name from the Pentagon code name for detainee operations in Iraq) created a new set of meanings by combining the graphic style of the iPod ad campaign with leaked photographs then in wide media circulation revealing torture conducted by personnel of the United States Army and the Central Intelligence Agency upon Iraqi prisoners inside Abu Ghraib, the Baghdad central prison. ·The iPod graphic of a person wearing earbuds was combined with a photograph of a man standing hooded on a box with electrical wires attached to his hands, and the slogan "iPod: 10,000 songs in your pocket" was replaced with the tagline "iRaq: 10,000 volts in your pocket, guilty or innocent." ·In placing these posters near and even within actual iPod ads, Copper Greene succeeded in subtly getting pedestrians to do double takes. The combination critiqued not only the use of torture in military prisons but also the dominance of individualized consumer media culture. The white wires of the iPod advertising campaign became the electric wires of torture, critiquing the way in which iPod culture (with headphones that shut us off from surrounding environments) reflects an insular consumer culture, one that allowed U.S. citizens to disavow the war and their complicity in it. Copper Greene's campaign affirms that the street remains a site of con-tested intents and meanings.

Gaze

·In theories of the visual arts, such as film theory and art history, the gaze is a term used to describe the relationship of looking in which the subject is caught up in dynamics of desire through trajectories of looking and being looked at among objects and other people. Gaze theory was central to the theories of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in his approach to how individuals enact desire. Applying Freud's and Lacan's theories to film, 1970s psychoanalytic film theorists posited that in cinema, the gaze of the spectator on the image was an implicitly male one that objectified the women on screen. Since the 1990s, theories of the gaze have complicated this original model and have introduced discussion of a variety of different kinds of gazes, for example, gazes distinguished by sex, gender, race, and class. ·Michel Foucault uses the term gaze to describe the relationship of subjects within a network of power—and the mechanism of vision as a means of negotiating and conveying power within that network—in a given institutional context. For Foucault, social institutions produce an inspecting, normalizing, or clinical gaze in which their subjects are caught and through which institutions keep track of their activities and thereby control and discipline them.

Intervisuality

·Looks at the inner-play between texts and images ·Visual culture scholar Nicholas Mirzoeff introduced the term intervisuality to describe the heightened mix and range of imaging engagements. ·Any viewing experience may involve a range of media forms, infrastructure and meaning networks and intertextual meanings.

Surveillance Gaze (including its power)

·One of the primary sources for understanding power and the gaze in surveillance comes, again, from Foucault. For Foucault, as we have noted, modern power is not something that negates and represses human subjects so much as it produces them. Power relations produce knowledge and particular kinds of citizens and subjects. In his book Discipline and Punish, Foucault analyzes the modern prison as a system in which power dynamics are relatively visible. Prior to the prison system, discipline entailed practices such as public shaming and execution. The use of force served as a visible sign of the sovereign state's power. The prison, Foucault explains, introduced a more indirect form of control. It was part of a new science of discipline that extended from the prison system to the military and education. This science entailed keeping people in line, and getting them to internalize and normalize obedience to the state, rather than using force, threat, or the spectacle of punishment. -Ex) Panopticon ·Surveillance is the act of keeping watch over a person or place. Camera technologies such as photography, video, and film have been used for surveillance purposes. For French philosopher Michel Foucault, surveillance is one of the primary means through which a society enacts control over its subjects through its encouragement of self-regulation.

Visual Othering

·Othering, but you are doing it with how you represent people -Ex) The Bath image - there is othering on the lady giving the bath & the way she is shown ·How do we represent people in films & pictures - do we represent different races differently?

Spectator

·The idea of where you are coming from and it gets into point of view, such as where are you looking from ·It gets into the idea of an idealized viewer ·Helps you work with things like male gaze and gaze ·A term derived from psychoanalytic film theory that refers to the viewer of visual arts such as cinema. In early versions of this theory, the term spectator did not refer to a specific individual or an actual member of the viewing audience but rather was imagined to be an ideal viewer, separate from all defining social, sexual, and racial aspects of viewer identity. ·In contrast, film theory in the late 1980s and 1990s emphasized specific identity groups of spectators, such as female spectators, working-class spectators, queer spectators, or black spectators. This work shifted away from the abstraction of the category to include more specific aspects of identity and processes such as identification and pleasure that are shaped by specific embodied experience. In addition, film theory has increasingly emphasized how one need not occupy an identity group to identify within that group's spectator position. For example, in action films, one does not have to be male to take up in fantasy the position of the male spectator.

Male Gaze

·The nineteenth-century painting The Bath confers anonymity and protection from the male gaze upon the white female body, in keeping with Western and Muslim codes of the era. But the black woman, perhaps an Islamic subject, is exposed to the gaze. Not only does she service the white woman whose body she bathes, she also services the Western spectator who may receive pleasure from the image of her partially nude body. · The concept of the male gaze was adapted and revised by various scholars, including Mulvey herself. ·In her essay, Mulvey theorizes the male spectator as being offered two kinds of subject positions with which to identify: the position of the camera, which frames and controls the female body image, or that of the active male protagonist, or whom female characters appear as objects of desire.32 Hollywood films, in Mulvey's account, offer an experience of "woman as image, man as bearer of the look."

Panopticon

·The panopticon design is the classic example for explaining this new system's emergence. The panopticon is a prison structure designed by the English philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham. ·The design features a concentric building composed of rings of cells, at the center of which stands a guard tower. This tower has windows and listening ducts that allow the guards to watch over and listen in on prisoners in the cells without themselves being visible or audible in return. Because the guard tower's inner chamber cannot be seen from the cells, inmates can never confirm the guards' presence. Inmates thus live in a constant state of knowing they might be under watch at any time, internalizing the guards' gaze. ·Panopticism is a concept used by French philosopher Michel Foucault to characterize the ways that modern social subjects regulate their own behavior, borrowing from nineteenth-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham's design for a panoptic prison in which all prisoners are visible from the guard tower with blacked-out windows. The prisoner cannot know whether the tower is manned or unmanned at any given time and therefore performs as if being watched at all times. Foucault suggested that in contemporary society we behave as if we are under a scrutinizing, panoptic gaze and that we internalize the rules and norms of the society as we imagine ourselves to be always potentially under a watchful eye.