VISUAL CULTURE
OBJECTIVE

Mahasiswa dapat membuktikan hubungan dalam
visual culture and representation, gaze dan
surveillance, photography, tourism. (C3)
MATERIALS
1.
Visual Culture and Representation
2.
Gaze and Surveillance
3.
Photography
4.
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
- 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.
PHOTOGRAPHY

The documentary tradition

Art photography vs. documentary photography
Art photography
Documentary photography
The photographer as seer
Photography as expression
Theories of imagination and
conceptual truth
Affectivity
Symbolism
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