VISUAL CULTURE

OBJECTIVE Mahasiswa dapat membuktikan hubungan dalam visual culture and representation, gaze dan surveillance, photography, tourism. (C3)

MATERIALS Visual Culture and Representation Gaze and Surveillance Photography Tourism

VISUAL CULTURE AND REPRESENTATION Sight the most developed human sense. Seeing comes before words. Images and words are complexly intertwined. Visual culture: text and way of life * As text – draws attention to those objects conventionally regarded as the acceptable target of sustained looking, and the technologies involved to produce these objects. * Way of life – points to one dimension of the desing for living held by any group of people. Modernism heightened visual culture. Hegemony caused by representation of the visual culture.

Continued … Case 1: The classic realist text Case 2: The male gaze - Classic text consists of a hierarchy of discourses - Classic text promotes relationships of identification, between the hero and the viewer of the text - Classic text is closed. It does not reveal a range of options on the truth or reality, then leaving the audience to choose between them. - the reader of such texts is essentially passive. The truth or reality will be set out for him or her by the end. Case 2: The male gaze Narrative cinema provides two main forms: - Scopophilia which refers to the sexual pleasure derived from looking. In its extreme forms this pleasure become voyeuristic – the perversion of scopophilia is to become a peeping tom. Scopophilia pleasure depends on a separation of the viewer from that which is being viewed. Pleasure is using another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight.

Continued … - Identification. The looking at the screen leads to the identification of the spectator with what appears in front of them. This process of identificaiton tends to break down the distance or separation that is inherent in the scopophilic process. The boundaries between the self and the film break down. The spectator almost becomes a part of the action in the film. - In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male, the scopophilia gaze, and passive/female, the identification gaze. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female figure which is styled accordingly. Men are active within the film itself and in their looking. Women are to be looked at. - The cinema developed three looks: * that of the camera as it records the pro-filmic event, * that of the audience as it watches the final product, * that of the characters at each other within the screen illusion.

GAZE AND SURVEILLANCE Gaze and Power – Michel Foucault The panopticon – the structure of surveillance Panoptic mechanism constructs the powerless prisoner as a subject of the gaze of the powerful. There are no dark corners where he or she can shelter. Punishment is no longer a spectable, but a form of inspection and surveillance.. e.g. The role of surveillance cameras in houses, malls, roads, etc.

Documentary photography The documentary tradition Art photography vs. documentary photography Art photography The photographer as seer Photography as expression Theories of imagination and conceptual truth Affectivity Symbolism Documentary photography The photographer as witness Photography as reportage Theories of empirical truth Information value Realism

TOURISM The tourist gaze * Separation of work and tourism, as a leisure activity, as different spheres of life. * Tourism involves movement and a stay in a different place or places. * Places stayed in are different from places where the tourist normally lives and works, but the tourist will return to home and work, * Places visited are different from work * Places visited are chosen because of the anticipation of pleasure and different experiences from those involved in normal, everyday experience. * The gaze of the tourist is to features which are different from those normally enountered. * The tourist gaze is constructed through signs. Forms of the tourist gaze

Continued … Forms of the tourist gaze Romantic Collective Spectatorial Environmental Anthropological Solitary, sustained immersion, gaze involving vision, awe, aura Communal activity, series of brief encounters, gazing at the familiar Communal activity, series of brief encounters, glancing and collecting different signs Collective organization, sustained and didactic,m scanning to survey and inspect Solitary, sustained immersion, Scanning and active interpretation