Chapter 3

This chapter was particularly interesting to me because I had read a lot of these philosophers last year in Sexuality in the Cinema. This chapter states that a lot of visual communication theory comes from film theory, which makes sense since film is a prominent medium in which we communicate visually.

This chapter also talks about looking in terms of spectators, spectatorship and the gaze. All three of these add new elements to the way we view things and mean to suggest some sort of relationship. The connection to psychoanalysis also brings up interesting ideas about the unconscious and the way that we interpret images through our dreams and repression.

When looking through mirrors, cameras, binoculars, and other interventions that are not the “naked eye” there is a voyeuristic sense of gazing and using instruments for an enabled ability to look. The gender difference is also significant-- male and female spectatorship is received very differently.

Main Points:
-Images provide a medium through which power relations are exercised and looks are exchanged. (visual economy)
-Gender, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation play a large role in interpreting images and in spectatorship overall
-Cultural orientation is also a binary for interpreting images and the conceived differences in East and West are often a topic to be played out
-“We live through associations between bodies, machines, nature and inanimate objects and across biology, technology, culture and science.” The politics of an industrializing nation forever changed us as a visual culture