Is seeing believing?
We live in a world in which images proliferate in daily life. To look is not simply about seeing. Looking can be restricted and controlled – it can be used to manipulate ideas and beliefs. While the term vision refers to the physical capacity to see, the concept of visuality refers to the ways in which vision is shaped through social context and interaction. Consider visuality in the workings of power in modern societies. Take the classroom for example, it is a space in which students look at one individual, the teacher/ instructor/ coach, who is assumed to have knowledge and power. Consider government buildings and the ways in which their design features lead you to notice some features and restrict your access to others, maintaining national defence and confidentiality while promoting a sense of their iconic stature. Consider artworks. How different is it to see an original work in a cultural institution from viewing it at home on a digital device, or in a print copy that hangs on your wall? How does it feel to be in the presence of an original work for the first time that you have long admired through reproductions? What does it mean to have your culture’s original works destroyed or looted in warfare? In an age of rampant reproduction, meaning making whether in relationship to culture, politics, data information identity or emotion is created through the distribution and sharing of visual images and icons. Furthermore, meaning can also be constructed through sensibilities, aesthetics and taste.
“Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognises before it can speak”.
So, what’s Visual Culture?
Visual Culture emerged as a field of study in the 1980s, just as images and visual screens were becoming increasingly prevalent in the production of media and modes of information, communication, entertainment and aesthetics. Apart from sight, visual media can engaged our other senses. Thus, the study of visual culture is grounded in a multimodal and multisensorial cultural practice. Different social realms can be interweaved with art, science, advertising, news media and entertainment. Students of Visual Culture would find John Berger’s 1972 classic Ways of Seeing familiar. The book was a model for the examination of images across disciplinary boundaries as media studies and art history and it was influential in disparate social realms such as art and advertising.
Studying Visual Culture is not only about seeing what is put on display. It is about how things are displayed and seeing what we are not shown, what we do not see.
