Visual Methodologies - Gillian Rose

http://www.miguelangelmartinez.net/IMG/pdf/2001_Rose_Visual_Methodologies_book.pdf

This sort of argument can take very diverse forms. But recently, many writers addressing these issues have argued that the visual is central to the cultural construction of social life in contemporary Western societies. It is now often suggested that much meaning is conveyed by visual images. We are, of course, surrounded by different sorts of visual technologies - photography, film, video, digital graphics, television, acrylics, for example - and the images they show us - tv programmes, advertisements, snapshots, public sculpture, movies, surveillance video footage, newspaper pictures, paintings. All these different sorts of technologies and images offer views of the world; they render the world in visual terms. But this rendering, even by photographs, is never innocent. These images are never transparent windows on to the world. They interpret the world; they display it in very particular ways. Thus a distinction is sometimes made between vision and visuality. Vision is what the human eye is physiologically capable of seeing. Visuality, on the other hand, refers to a way in which vision is constructed in various ways; 'how we see, how we are able, allowed, or made to see, and how we see this seeing and the unseeing therein' (Foster, 1988a: ix).    -6P

The panopticon was a tall tower, surrounded by an annular building. The latter consisted of cells, one for each inmate, with windows so arranged that the occupant was always visible from the tower. The tower was the location of the supervisor, but because of the arrangement of its windows, blinds, doors and corridors the inmates in their cells could never be certain that they were under observation from the tower at any particular moment. Never certain of invisibility, each inmate therefore had to behave `properly' all the time: thus they disciplined themselves and were produced as docile bodies. `Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power' (Foucault, 1977: 210).     ...    Foucault suggests that institutions work in two ways: through their apparatus and through their technologies.    - 166p

Technologies are `diffuse, rarely formulated in continuous, systematic discourse . . . often made up of bits and pieces . . . a disparate set of tools and methods' (Foucault, 1977: 26).    .....    For Tagg, photography is diffuse; it is given coherence only by its use in certain institutional apparatuses.
 

All images have their space organized in some way, and there are two related aspects of this organization to consider: the organization of space `within' an image, and the way the spatial organization of an image offers a particular viewing position to its spectator. This offer is part of an image's way of seeing.    ...    First, the spatial organization within the image ... How are these arranged in relation to each other? ...     the space in which these volumes are placed. Acton (1997: 25±50) suggests thinking about width, depth, interval and distance.    -40p