::::::::Practices of Looking::::::::

::::::::Practices of Looking::::::::

image amplifications

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright, 'Introduction' Practices of Looking: an Introduction to Visual Culture (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2001)

Seeing: a process of observing and recognizing the world around us in a somewhat arbitrary way as we go about our daily lives.

Looking: to actively make meaning of that world with a more involved sense of purpose and direction. Through looking we negotiate social relationships and meanings. Looking is a practice much like speaking, writing or singing. Looking involves learning to interpret and it involves relationships of power.

Their First Murder
1936

by Weegee

born Usher Fellig,

June 12 in Lemberg (also know as Lvov), Austria (now Ukraine).

http://www.icp.org/weegee/

Mimesis(reflection of reality), Representation, Symbol and Meaning

Still Life with Stoneware Jug, Wine Glass, Herring and Bread

By Pieter Claesz 1642

http://www.getty.edu/art/collections/objects/o607.html

Defying Representation

The Treachery of Images 1928-29

Rene Magritte

Repurposing images, symbols, the loss of aura of the original

The Myth of Photographic Truth

A photograph is often perceived to be an unmediated copy of the real world….but it is not.

Trolley-New Orleans 1955-56

by Robert Frank

Beyond documenting facts.

Evoking powerful emotions about the momentous changes about to occur in the

American South in relation to segregation legally, politically and socially

Roland Barthes, French theorist: myths - the hidden cultural values and conventions through which meanings are made to seem universal and given for awhile society, even though in reality they are specific to certain groups. (beauty & thinness)

* Denotative Meaning: Presenting evidence, literal descriptive meaning

* Connotative Meaning: relying on the cultural and historical context of the image and its viewers’ lived, felt knowledge of those circumstances, evoking a magical, mythical quality.

From The Americans, a photographic essay he made while traveling around the USA

http://www.yale.edu/amstud/r66/fr2.html

http://m2.aol.com/UvGotMail/frank/frank.html

Semiotics: the theory and study of signs and symbols, especially as elements of language or other systems of communication.

We interpret images around us and determine what they signify.

What does this Benetton add mean?

civil war?

Terrorism, eye-catching?

Benetton as company with a sense of social concern for the problems of the world?

Advertisements connoting rugged individualism and life on the American Frontier, when men were “real” men. Embodying a romanticized idea of freedom that stands in contrast to the more confined lives of most workers today…