1 Practices of Looking

Images, Power, and Politics

Every day, we are in the practice of looking to make sens~ of the world. To see
is a process of observing and recognizing the world around us. To look is to
actively make meaning of that world. Seeing is something that we do some-
what arbitrarily as· we go about our daily lives. Looking is an activity that
involves a greater sense of purpose and direction. If we ask, "Did you see
that?" we imply happenstance {"Did you happen to see it?"). When we say,
"Look at that!" it is a command. TQJ.o.Q_k is an act of choice. Through _looking
we negotiate social relationships and meanings. Looking is a practice much
like speaking, writing, or signing. Looking involves learning to interpret and,
\like other practices, looking involves relationships of power. To willfully look or
not is to exercise choice and infiuence. To be made to look, to try to get
someone else to look at you or at something you want to be noticed, or to
engage in an exchange of looks, entails a play of power. Looking can be easy
or difficult, fun or unpleasant, harmless or dangerous. There are both con-
scious and unconscious levels of looking. We engage in practices of looking to ·
communicate, to infiuence and be infiuenced.
We live in cultures that are increasingly permeated by vLs_ual images with a
. "! variety.of-purpose.s_and intende'd effects. These images can produce in us a
· wide array of emotions and responses: pleasure, desire, disgust, anger, curios-
ity, shock, or confusion. We invest the images we create arid encounter on a
daily basis with significant power-for instance, the power to conjure an
absent person, the power to calm or incite to action, the power to persuade
or mystify. A single image can serve a multitude of purposes, appear in a range
of settings, and mean different things to different people. The roles played by

10 Practices of Looking
 Weegee, Their First
Murder, before 1945

images are multiple, diverse, and complex. This image, of school children in
the early 1940s who see a murder scene in the street, was taken by photog-
rapher Weegee (whose real name was Arthur Fellig). Weegee was known for
his images of crimes and violence in the streets of New York, where he would
listen to a police radio in order to get to crime scenes early. In this photograph,
he calls attention both to the act of looking at the forbidden and to the capac-
ity of the still camera to capture heightened emotion. The children are looking
at the murder scene with morbid fascination,.as-we-look-with_Eilll.@Lfascina-
tjo_ll_~R.On them-looking.
The images we encounter every day span the social realms of popular
culture, advertising, news and information exchange, commerce, criminal
justice, and art. They are produced and experienced through a variety of
media: painting, printmaking, photography, film, television/video, computer
digital imaging, and virtual reality. One could argue that all of these media-
including those that do not involve mechanical or technological means of
production-are imaging technologies. Even paintings are produced with the
"technology" of paint, brush, and canvas. We live in an increasingly image-
saturated society where paintings, photographs, and electronic images
depend on one another for their meanings. The most famous paintings
of Western art history have been photographically and electronically

Practices of Looking 11
Van Gogh painting
on coffee mug

reproduced, and many. of these reproductions have been touched up

or altered by means of computer graphics. For most of us, kQ_CJVl'lecig~_-of
famous paintings is not first,hand, blltthr_ougb:reproductionsin books and on
pos_ters,_gre1,tingcards, clas_s__ro.Qm slides, andte[evision specials about art
.history. The techn,ology of. images is thus central to our experience of visual
culture.

Representation
1/?epresentation refers to the use of language and images to
~reate meaning about the world around us. We use words to understand,
describe, and define the world as we see it, and we also use images to do thi:-
This process takes place through systems of representation, such as language
and visual media, that have rules and conventions about how they are or-
ganized. A language like English has a set of rules about how to express and
interpret meaning, and so, for instance, do the systems of representation.of
painting, photography, cinema, or television.
Throughout history, debates about representation have considere(J-
. .
whether these-systems ofrepresentation.refiect the world as it is, such that
· they h]irror it back to us as a form of mimesis or imitation, or whether in fact
_wre construct.the-world and its meaning through the systems of representa:_
tion we deploy. In thiscsocia/ constructionist 11pproach, we only make meaning
----

12 Practices of Looking
-· ------ ---· ···-·

of the material;vorld througllsp.e,cific cultural cqntexts. This takes place in part .

through the language systems (be they writing, speech, or images) that we
use. Hence _tb.ec material._ worlcLonly~_ meaQing,::-oand~only_can be r'

1:~:~J~tf\f~~~~~1fl~:t: s~:~~: ::~ei~~;~::~::~:h~~ ::~::e:::i:hn~-1

but that we actually construct the meaning of the material wo!ld thr~_g_h_t_hese ,
_ sys!em_s.
Over time, images have been used to represent, make meaning of, and
convey various sentiments about nature, ~ty;-an-d culture as well as to rep-
--------·-· - --
resent imaginary worlds and abstract concepts. Throughout much of history,
for example, images, most of them paintings, have been used by religions to
convey religious myths, church doctrines, and historical dramas. Many images
have been produced to depict seemingly accurate renditions of the world
around us, while others have been created to express abstract concepts and
feelings such as love. Language and systems of representation do not refiect
an already existing reality so much as they organize, construct, and mediate
our understanding of realfry, emotion, and imagination. \
- Thed~l:~~tion between the idea of refiection, or .mimesis} and representa-
tion as a construction of the material world can often be difficult to make. The
still life, for instance, has been a favored subject of artists for many centuries.
One might surmise that the still life is simply about the desire to_@_fle_ct, rather
than make meaning of, material objects. In the still_life_on the next page,
painted in 1642 by Dutch painter Pieter Claesz, an array of food and drink is
carefully arranged on· a table, and painted with an attention to each minute
detail. The objects, such as the tablecloth, dishes, bread, carafe, and glass,
are rendered with an attention to light and seem so lifelike that one imagines
one could touch them. Yet, is this image simply a refiection of this particular
scene, rendered with skill by the artist? Is_ it simply a mimesis ofa scene,
paint_edfor_thei sake of demonstrating skill?-Glaesz worked in the seventeenth
century, when Dutch painters were fascinated with the still life form, and
painters painted many such works with attention to creating the illusion of
material objects on canvas. The Dutch·still life ranged in form from those that
were straightforwardly representational.to-those that-were-_d_eepjy2 y.robolic.
Many were not simply about a composition of food and~irl_k'._b_u_t_~r_lete with
allusion~_r,_d 2ymi,_0Jis111,~as well as f)hilosophical ideas. Many works, such
as this, were concerned with depicting the_t@nsience o_f ea_rthly life through
the. ephemeral materiality
,
of food. They call forth the senses
---. - ,_.....--
through
·-·
the

Practices of Looking 13
I
Pieter Claesz, Still Ute
with Stoneware Jug,
Wine Glass, Herring, and
Bread, 1642

depiction of foods which are associated with particular aromas, in which par-
tially eaten f ~ evoke the experience of eating. In this work, the@ is
simple, a reference to the everyday food of the common people, yet one can
also see the potential religious allusions of bread, wine, and fish to Christian
rituals.' Yet, even if we simply read this image as a representation of food
wi.thout any ·symbolism, its original meaning was derived from its depiction of
what food and drink meant in se~enteenth-century Holland: Here, the lan-
guage of painting is used to create a particular set of meanings according to
a set of conventions about realistically depicting the material world. We will
discuss concepts of realism more in Chapter 4. Here, we want to note that this
painting produces meanings about these objects, rather than simply reflecting
some meaning that is already within them.
Representation is thus a process through which we construct the world
arou~d us, even through a simple scene such as this, and make meaning from
it. We learn the rules and conventions of the systems of representation within
a given culture. Many artists have attempted to defy those conventions,
to break the rules of various systems of representation, and to push at the

14 Practices of Looking
 definitions of representation. In this painting, for example, Surrealist painter
Rene Magritte comments upon the process of representation. Entitled The
Treachery of Images (1928-29), the painting depicts a pipe with thetline in
French, "This is not a pipe." One could argue, on the one hand, that Magritte
is making a joke, that of course it is an image of a pipe that he has created.
However, he is also Jl_ointing to_the_relationahiR__b_etv,.,_een_w_9_rds_<3_nd_th[r1gs,
since this is not a pipe itself but rather the representation of a pipe; itis.a.painlc-
i_ng_r_atbe_r__than_ll:le__material object itself. Philosopher Michel Foucault elabo-
rates these ideas in a short text about this painting and a drawing by Magritte
that preceded it. 2 Not only does he address the painting's implied commen-
tary about the relationship between words and things, he also considers the
complex relationship amen£_ the drawing,the-painting.,-their_words,_and_their
referent (\b_e pipe). One could not pick up and smoke this pipe. So, Magritte
can be seen to be warning the viewer not to mistake the image for the real
thing. He marks the very act bf naming, drawing our attention to the word
"pipe" itself, and its function in representing the object. Both the word "pipe"
and the image of the pipe represent the material object pipe, and in pointing
1
this out, Magritte asks us to consider how they produce meaning about it.
Thus, when we stop and examine the process of representation, as Magritte

,i
!I
I,

I
[
[
[
1
I
if
Rene Magritte, The
Treachery of Images
;\ (Ceci n'est pas une
pipe), 1928-29

( Practices of Looking 15
 asks us to do, a process that we normally take for granted, we can see the
complexity of how words and images produce meaning in our world.

The myth of photographic truth

_The rules and conventions of different
systems of representation vary, and we attribute different sets of. cultural
meanings to each-such as paintings, photographs, and television images.
Many of the images discussed in this book were produced by cameras and
through photographic or electronic technologies. ·These images belong to the
.various worlds of fine art, public art, advertising, popular culture, alternative
media, the news media, and science.
' - No matter what social role an image plays, the creation of.an image through
a camera lens always involves some degree of subjective choice through selec-
__tion, framing, and personalization. It is true that some types of image record-
ing seem to take place without human intervention. In surveillance videos, for
instance, no one stands behind the lens to d,etermine what shoul9 be shot and
h~t.it...Yet even in surveillance video.someone has programmed the
camera to record a particular part of a space and framed that space in a
particular way. In the case of many automatic· video and still-photography
cameras designed for the consumer market, aesthetic choices like focus and
framing are made as if by the camera itself, yet in fact the designers of these
cameras also made decisions based on social and aesthetic norms such as
clarity and legibility. These mechanisms are invisible to the user-they are

-----
_black-boxed, relieving the photographer of various decisions. Yet, it remains
the pho~~r who frames_ari_d__!~kes the image, not the camera itself. At
the same time, despite the subjective aspects of the act of taking a picture,
the aura of machine Qbjectlvity clings to mechanical and electronic images.
.-
All camera-generated images, be they photographic, cinematic, or electronic
(video or computer-generated), bear the cultural legacy of still photography,
which historically has been regarded as a more objective practice than, say,
painting or drawing. This cCJmt:iination of the subjective and the objective is a
central tension in camera-generated images.
· Ph"otogra-phy was developed in Europe ir the early nineteenth century,
wheri concepts qf positi~ist, science held ~ay. 1 Positivism involves tlie belief
,,1\ that empirical truths can be established through visual evidence. An em-
pir~uth is something that can be prnven through e~ntation, in

16 Practices of Looking
 /particular through the reproduction of an experiment with identical outcomes
· l under carefully controlled circumstances. In po.sitivism, the individual actions
'-of the scientist came to be viewed as a liability in the process of performing
and reproducing experiments, since it was thought that the scientist's own
subjectivity would infiuence or prejudice the objectivity of the experiment.
Hence, m_a_chines were re~arded as more reliable than h.umans. Similarly, pho-
tography is a method of producing images that involves a mechanical record-
ing device (the camera) rather than hand recording (pencil on paper). In the
(·· context of positivism, the photographic camera was taken to be a scientific
I tool for registering reality and was regarded by its early advocates as a means
I of representing the world more accurate!)' than_hand-rendered imag_es.

! Since the mid-1800s, there have been many arguments for and against the
idea that photographs are objective renderings of the real world that provide
an unbiased truth because cameras are seemingly detached from a subjec- J
tive, particular human viewpoint. These debates have taken on new intensi.ty
with the introduction
---
of digiteUrnaging processes.
---
A photograph is often per- :z:
\
/
ceived to be an unmediated,copy_of.tbe_[e_ill world, a trace of reality skimmed_ ./
off the vewsur:face of life. We refer to this concept as the myth of photo- J .:

,·graphic truth. For instance, when a photograph is introduced as documentary·

\ J
evidence in a courtroom, it is often presented as if it were incontrovertible
rfroof.that_an_e_ye_nLto_olrnlac~i]___g_p_acticuJar__w11_y. As such, it is perceived to
SJ,_eak-the-truth. At the same time, the truth-value of photography has been

"
the focus of many debates, in contexts such as courtrooms, about the differ-'
ent (~t~that.imagescean_te_ll. a_ \
Camera images are also associated with truth-value in more everyday set-
tings ..A photograph in a family album is often perceived to tell the truth, such
as the fact that a particular family gathering took place, a vacation was taken,
or a birthday was celebrated. Photographs have been used to prove that
someone w-as alive at a given place and time in history. For instance, after the
Holocaust, many survivors sent photographs to their families from whom they
had bee~ Jong separated as an affirmation of their being aliv~ .. lt iS__il_,i5a@~·
oJphotograp]J_y that althmigh we know that images can be ambigl!.Q.us_anclare
, ~3D.!Rula_ted.or-altered,.p_a.p:i.cularly_wj_t_b_tbl"JlelQ of comQuter graphics,
_r:rl!lgLoLthe_powecoLphotograpny_still_JLe_s_J_rl__ the__ shared-be_lief-that-
p_li_gt_ogcapbs_arn_obje_ctiv_e-9Ltl'.uthful records of events. Our awareness of the
subjective nature of imaging is in constant tension with the legacy of objec-
tivity that clings to the cameras and machines that produce images today.

Practices of Looking 17
 Yet, the sense that photographic images are evidence of the real also gives
them a kind of magical quality that add_s to their documentary quality. The
images created by cameras can be simultaneously informative and ex~sive.
This photograph was taken by Robert Frank in his well-known photographic
essay, The Americans, which he created while travelling around the USA in the
mid-19505. The image documents a sei(regated group of white and black pas-
sengers on a city trolley in New Orleans. As a factual piece of evidence about
the past, it records a particular moment in time in the racially segregated
American South of the 1950s. Yet, at the same time, ,-this.photograph-does
__ more-than.document- facts. For some contemporary viewers, this image is
magically moving insofar as it evokes powerful emotions about the momen-
Robert Frank, tous changes about to occur in the American South. The picture was taken
Trolley-New Orleans,
1955-56 just before laws, policies, and social mores concerning segregation began to

18 Practices of Looking
 undergo radical changes in response to Civil Rights activism. The faces of the
passengers each look outward with different expressions, responding in dif-
ferent ways to the journey. It is as if the trolley itself represents the passage
of life, and the expressive faces of each passenger the way in which th~y con-
front and experience their life. The trolley riders seem to be.. eternally_held
within the
'---
vehicle, a group of strangers thrown together to journey down the
------

same road, just as the Civil Rights era in the South brought together strangers
for a political journey. Thus, this photograph is valuable both as an empirical,
informational document and as an expressive vehicle. The power of the image
derives not only from its status as photographic evidence but from its power-
.Jul evocation of the emotions of life's struggles. It thus demonstrates the
photograph's capacity both to present evidence and to evoke a magical
or mythical quality.
/
In addition, this image, like all images, has two levels of meaning. French
,[. theorist Roland Barthe~ described these two levels with the terms c!.fnotative
· and connotative meaning. An image can denote certain apparent truths,
providing documentary evidence of objectfve circumstances. The denotativ"'
meaning of the image refers to its literal, des_criptive meaning. The same
photograph connotes more culturally specific meanings. Connotative mean-
ings rely on the cultural and historical context of the image and its vieweis'
lived, felt knowledge of those clrcumstances-all that the image means to
them personally and socially. This Robert Frank photograph denotes a group
of passengers on a trolley. Yet, clearly its meaning is broader than this simple
description. This image connotes a collective jQurney of life and race relations.
The dividing line between what an image denotes and what it connotes can
be ambiguous, as in this image, where the facts of segregation alone may
produce particular connotative associations for some vie,ers. These two con-
cepts help us to think about the differences between images functioning as
evidence and as works that evoke more complex feelings and associations.
Another image of passengers on a trolley might connote a very different set
of meanings.
Roland Barthes used the term _171yth to refer to the cultural values and beliefs
that are expressed at this level of connotation. For Barthes, myt11 is the hidden
set of rules and conventions through which meanings, which are in reality
specific to certain groups, are made to seem universal and given for a whole
society. Myth thus allows the connotati_ve meaning of a particular thing or I
image to appear to be denotative, hence literal or natural. Barthes argued

Practices of Looking 19
 that a French ad for Italian sauce and pasta is not simply presenting
a product but is producing a myth about Italian culture-the concept of
"ltalianicity." 3 This message, wrote Barthes, is not for Italians, but is specifically
about a French concept of Italian culture._ Similarly, one could argue that the
contemporary concepts of beauty and thinness naturalize. certai~ cultural
norms of appearance as being universal. These norms constitute a myth in
Barthes's terms, because__they ar_e historically and culturally sri"ecific, not
"natural. 11
Barthes's concepts of myth and connotation are particularly useful.in exam-_
ining notions of photographic truth ..Among the range of images produced by
cameras, there are cultural meanings that affect our expectations and uses of
images. We do not, for example, bring the same expectations about the rep-
resentation of truth to newspaper photographs as we do to television news
images orto film images that we view in a movie theater. A significant differ-
ence among these forms· is their relationship to time and their ability to be
widely reproduced. Whereas conventional photographs and films .need to be
developed and printed before they can be viewed and reproduced, the ele.c-
c ,,, · tronic nature of television images means that they are instantly viewable and
can be transmitted around the world live. As 'moving images, cinematic and
television images are combined with sound and music in narrative forms, and
their meaning often lies in the sequence of images rather than its individual
frames.
- Similarly, the cultural meanings of and expectations about computer and
digital images are different from those of conventional photographs. Because
computer images can look increasingly like photographs, people who produce
them sometimes play with the conventions of photographic__ realism. For
example, an imagegenerated exclusively by computer graphics software can
be made to appear to be a photograph of actual objects, places, or people,
when in fact it is a _simulation, th.~t is, "it does not represent something in the
real world. In addition; computer graphics programs can be used to modify or
rearrange the elements of a "realistic" photograph. Widespread use of digital
· imaging technologies since the 1990s has dramatically altered the status of
the photograph, particularly in the new_s me~ia. Digital imaging thus can be
said to have pa~od_e_d.tb__e_[)ll_iJ_lic's trust in the truth-value of photogra-
phy- and- the camera image as evide~e. Yet, at the same-iime-;-tnealtered
image may still appear to represent a photographic truth. The meaning of an
. '

20 Practices _of Looking

 image, and our expectations of it, is thus. tied to the technology through which
it is produced. We will discuss this further in Chapter 4:

Images and ideology

To explore the meaning of images is to recognize
'that they are produced within dynamics of social power and
. ~
ideology)
/
ldeo-
logies are systems of belief that exist within all cultures. Images are an impor-
tant means through whicli ideologie!rare phicluce_d-and onto which ideologies
, are projected. When people-think-of-ideologies;-they often think in terms of \
_,µropagandaJthe crude process of using false representations to lure people I
into holding beliefs that may compromise their own interests. This under- 1
standing of ideology assumes that to act ideologically is to act out of igno-
rance. In this particular sense, the term "ideology" carries a pejorative.cast.
However, ideology is a much more pervasive, mundane process in which we
all engage, whether we are aware of it or not. For our purposes, we defin,;-·
ideology as the broad but indispensable, sh~red set of values and beliefs : ~
1
through which individuals live out their complex relations to_a range of social , "
structures. Ideologies are widely varied and exist at all levels of all cultureSc-'
Our ideologies are diverse and ubiquitous; they inform our everyday lives in
often subtle and barely noticeable forms. One could say that ideology is the
means by which certain values, such as individual freedom, progress, and the
I importance of home, are made to seem like natural, inevitable aspects of

l ~verydayJife, Ideology is manifested in widely shared social assumptions

about not only the way things are but the way we all know things should be.
I Images and media representations are some of the forms through which we
persuade others to share certain views or not, to hold certain values or not.
Practices of looking are intimately tied. to ideology. The i)!lag_e culture in
r which ""_e li\/eis an arenaof diverse and <ilien co~flicting ideologi~ges /
l. are elements of contemporary advertising and consumer culture through
' which assumptions about beauty, desire, glamour, and social value are both
.I constructed and responded to. Film and television are media through which
we see reinforced ideological constructions such as the value of romantic love,
' ~
I
· the norm of heterosexuality, nationalism, or traditional concepts of good and , ·'
evil. The most important ~spect of ideologies i.s that they appear to be natur~
or given, rather than part of a system of belief that a culture produces in order

Practice_s of Looking ~
 to function in a particular way. Ideologies am thus, like Barthes's concept of
myth, c211_notations_p_aro.dlng_a_,Ldenotations.
- --visual culture is integral to ideologies and power relations. Ideologies
are produced and affirmed through the social institutions in a given society,
such as the family, education, medicine, the law, the government, and the
entertainment industry, among others. Ideologies permeate the world of
entertainment;, and images are also used for regulation, categorization,
identification, and evidence. Shortly after photography was developed in the
early nineteenth century, private citizens began hiring photographers to make
individual and family portraits. Portraits often marked important moments
such as births, marriages, and even deaths (the funerary portrait was a
popular convention). But photographs were also widely regarded as tools of
science and of public surveillance. Astronomers spoke of using photographic
film to mark the movements of the stars. Photographs were used in hospitals,
mental institutions, and prisons to record, classify, and study populations.
Indeed, in rapidly growing urban industrial centers, photographs quickly
became an important way for police and public health officials to monitor
urban populations perceived to be growing not only in numbers, but also in
rates of crime and social deviance.
What is the legacy of this us.e of images as a means of controli~~~

22 Practices of Looking
 tions today? We live in a society in which portrait images are frequently used,
" . '-'-
·" like fingerprints, as personal identification-on passports, driver's licenses/·;
credit cards, and identification cards for schools, the welfa.re system, and
many other institutions. Photographs are a primary medium for evidence in
the criminal justice system. We are accustomed to the fact that most stores
and banks are outfitted with surveillance cameras and that our daily lives are
tracked not only through our credit records, but through camera records. On
a typical day of work, errands, and leisure, the activities of people in cities are
recorded, often unbeknownst to them, by numerous cameras. Often these
images stay within the realm of identification and surveillance, where they go
unnoticed by most of us. But sometimes their venues change and they circu-
late in the public realm, where they acquire new meanings.
This happened in 1994, wh_en the fo9'rler football star o. J. Simpson was
arrested.as a suspect in a notorious murder cas.e. Simpson's image had pre-
. '
viously appeared only in sports media, advertising, and celebrity news media./
He was rendered a different kind of public figure when his portrait, in the form
of his police mug·shot, was published on the covers of Time and Newsweek
magazines. The mug shot is a common use of photography in the criminal
justice system. Information about all arrested people, whether they are con-
victed or not, is entered into the system in the form of personal data, finger-

Practices of Looking- 23
 prints, and photographs. The conventions of the mug shot were presumably
familiar to most people who saw the covers of Time and Newsweek. Frontal
and side views of suspects' unsmiling, unadorned faces are shot. T,be_se _
rentions-Of-~roiog..aOQJ:!)_rll_ROSition alone_ connote to ~i_e_wers:_a__s_ense
\/of the..subject's__deyianc~_and glJillj, r~g;,rdless of who is thus framed; t_he
image _fg_rmat has the power to suggest 1:11e_photographic subject's guilt. 0. J.
---- --- ---------- - - - - -
Simpson's mug shot seemed to be no different from any other in this regard.
Whereas Newsweek used the mug s_hot as it was, Time heightened the con-
,trast and darkened Simpson's skin tone in its use of this image on· the maga-
Y.'
"' zine's cover, reputedly for "aesthetic" reasons. Interestingly, the magazine's
publishers do not allow this cover to be reproduced. What ideological assump-
tion might be said to underlie this 'i®cept-of-aesthetics? Critics charged that
Time was following the historical convention of usin_ll darker skin tones to
connote evil and to imply guilt. In motion pictures made during the first half
~ -
of this century, when black and Latino performers appeared, they were most
1

often cast in the roles of villains and evil characters. This convention tied into ·
the lingering ideologies of nineteenth-century racial science, in which it was
·proposed that certain bodily forms and attributes, including darker shades of

J skin, indicated a predisposition toward social deviance. Though this view was
contested in the twentieth century, darker skin tones nonetheless continued
to be used as literary, theatrical, and cinematic symbols of evil. Thus, dark-
ness came to connote negative qualities. Hollywood studios even developed
special makeup to darken the skin tones of Anglo, European, and light-skinned
black and Latino performers to emphasize a character's evil nature.
In this broader context, the darkening of Simpson's skin tone cannot be
seen as a purely aesthetic choice but rather an ideological one. Although the
. - --- ----- I
magazine cover designers may not have intended to evoke this history of
.
media representations, we live in a culture in which the association of ~rk
.
tones with evil and_tbe stereotype- -of- -black
~~--- . -
men as criminals still circulate. In
addition, because of the codes of the mug shot, it could be said that by simply
taking Simpson's image out of the context of the police file and placing it in
the public eye, Time.and Newsweek.influenced the public to see Simpson as
v a criminal even before he had been placed on trial.
· Like Simpson's mug shot, images often move across social arenas. Docu-
mentary images can appear in advertisements, amateur photographs and
videotapes can become news images, and news images are sometimes incor-
_porated into art works. Each change in context produces a change in.meaning.

24 Practice? of Looking
 we negotiate the meaning of imag~s , · , (;!
The capacity of images to (
s as viewers and consumers is dependent on the larger cultural mean-/'
·1 invoke and the social, political, and cultural contexts in which the}i
'2d, Their meanings lie not within their image elements alone, but arf
when they are "consumed," viewed, and interpreted, The meaningsj \
rnage are multiple; they are created each time it is viewed, '
I ?lU!UJB<lJJ many tools to interpret images and create me;nings with thgm, and
, L~-~)ften use these tools of looking automatically, without giving them much
thought Images are produced according to social and aesthetic convention~
Conventions are like road signs; we must learn their codes for them to mak~j
sense; the codes we learn become second nature, Just as we recognize the
meaning of most road sign symbols almost immediately, we read, o d co e
more complex images almost instantly, giving little thougnt to our Fe€ s of
decoding, For instance, when we see the graphic of a torch that represents
the Olympic Games, we do not need to think through the process whereby we
come to make that association,
But our associations with symbols and codes and their meanings are far
from fixed. Some images demonstrate thil; process oichange quite nicely by
playing on accepted conventions of representation to make us aware of the

Practices of Looking 25
Madonna in one of her
many identities

contain layers of meaning that include their formal aspects, their cultural and
socio-historical references, the ways they make reference to the images
that precede and surround them, and the contexts in which they are dis-
played. Reading and interpreting images is one way that we, as viewers,
contribute to the process of assigning value to the culture in which we
live. Practices of looking, then, are not passive acts-of consumption. By looking I'
-- -- I
at and engaging with images in the world, we infiuence the meanings and I
uses assigned to the images_ that fill our day-to-day lives. In the next chapter, /
we will examine the many ways that viewers create meaning when I
\ they engage in looking.

No\es
1. See"Simon ScharTla, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the
Golden Age (Berkeley and Lm:idon: University of California Press, 1988), ch. 3.

42 Practices of Looking
2. See Michel Foucault, This ls Not a Pipe, with illustrations and letters by Rene Magritte, trans-
lated and edited by James Harkness (Berkeley and London: ~niversity df California Press,
1983).
3. Roland Barthes, "Rhetoric of the Image," from JfT/age Music Text, translated by Stephen
Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 34. --
4. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (New York and Londo~: Penguin, 1972), 131.

Further Reading
Roland Barthes. Mythologies. Translated by Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang, [1957]
1972.
--Elements of Semiology. Translated by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith. New York: Hill and
Wang, 1967.
--"The Photographic Message" and "Rhetoric of the Image." In Image Music Text. Translated
by Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.
--Camera Lucido: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. New York:
Hill and Wang, 1981.
John Berger. Ways of Seeing. New York and London: Penguin, 1972.
lnguar Bergstrom. Dutch Still-Life Painting in the Seventeenth Century. London: Faber and Faber,
1956.
Norman Bryson. Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting. Cambridge, Mass:
and London: Harvard University Press, 1990.
Victor Burgin, ed. Thinking Photography. London: Macmillan, 1982.
Michel Foucault. This Is Not a Pipe. With illustrations and letters by Rene Magritte. Trans-
lated and edited by James Harkness. Berkeley and London: University of California Press,
1983.
Henry Giroux. "Consuming Social Change: The United Colors of Benetton.". In Disturbing
Pleasures: Learning Popular Culture. New York and London: Routledge, 1994.
Stuart Hall, ed. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. Thousand
Oaks, Calif. and London: Sage, 1997.
Terence Hawkes. Structuralism and Semiotics. Berkeley and London: University of California
Press, 1977.
Floyd Merrel. Semiosis in the Postmodern Age. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995.
--Peirce, Signs, and Meaning. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997.
Christian Metz. Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema. Translated by Michael Taylor.
Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, [1974] 1991.
Nicholas Mirzoeff. An Introduction to, Visual Culture. New York and London: Routledge,
1999.
Richard Robin. "Annotated Catalog of the Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 1998. On-line at: (www.iupui.edu/%7Epeirce/web/index.
htm).
Ferdinand de Saussure. Course in General Linguistics. Contributor; Charles Bally. -Translated by
Roy Harris. Chicago: Open Court Publishing, [1915] 1988.
Simon Schama. The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden
Age. Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1988.
Thomas A. Sebeck. Signs: An Introduction to Semiotics. Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
• 1995.
Allan Sekula. "On the Invention of Photographic Meaning.'' In Thinking Photography. Edited by
Victor Burgin. London: Macmillan, 1982, 84-109.
Kaja Silverman. The Subject of Semiotics. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.
Susan Sontag. On Photography. New York: Delta, 1977.

Practices of Looking 43
 Mary Anne Staniszewski. Believing is Seeing: Creating the Culture of Art. New York and London:
Penguin, 1995.
John Storey, ed. Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader. Athens: University of Georgia
Press, 1,998.
Peter Wollen. Signs and Meaning in the Cinema. London: British Film Institute, 1969.

44 Practices of Looking
 Practices
of Looking
An Introduction
to Visual Culture

Marita Sturken
and
Lisa Cartwright

OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS

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Acknowledgements

Research for this book was supported in part by grants from the Zumberge
Fund of the University of Southern California, and the James Irvine Foundation
through the Southern California Studies Center (SC2) at USC. Christie Milliken,
JoAnn Hanley, Amy Herzog, and Joe Wlodarz were extremely resourceful in
their work on researching photographs. We are grateful to Amelia Jones, Toby
Miller, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Jackie Stacey, and many other anonymous readers
who provided very helpful and informed feedback on a previous draft. Our
thanks to the many people who have shepherded this book at Oxford, includ-
ing Andrew Lockett, Tim Barton, Sophie Goldsworthy, designer Tim Branch,
and in particular Angela Griffin and Miranda Vernon, who have been efficient,
attentive, and resourceful. Finally, we are grateful to Dana Polan and Brian
Goldfarb for their advice and support throughout this project.

M.S. and L.C.

R!C: 1 ::Rl _ \'1~.~"RY

• ,..,.,., 1°·,,--r,,-1 !\-)C