What is the 'Gaze'?
‘The gaze’ is a technical term which was originally used in film theory in the 1970s but which is now more broadly used by media theorists to refer both to the ways in which viewers look at images of people in any visual medium and to the gaze of those depicted in visual texts. According to Schroeder, the gaze "signifies a psychological relationship of power, in which the gazer is superior to the object of the gaze"
We'll focus closely on the Lutz and Collins article on 'The photograph and the intersection of gazes' to help structure this presentation. Their article talks about how the National Geographic magazine is of a tremendous potential cultural importance, where its photographs have voraciously focused on the third world scenes.
A majority of their photographs are of the non-westerner and can be seen not simply as captured view of the other but a dynamic site at which gazes or view points intersect. This intersection creates a complex and multi-dimensional object. It allows viewers to negotiate a number of different identities both for themselves and those pictured.
The article explores the significance of the gaze, and the 7 kinds of gaze that can be found in the photograph. The 7 are...
1. The Photographers Gaze
2. The Institutional Gaze, magazine gaze.
3. The Readers Gaze.
4. The Non-Westerners Gaze.
5. The Explicit looking done by westerners.
6. The Gaze returned or refracted.
7. Our own academic gaze.
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AN EXPLICIT WESTERN GAZE
The effects of this type of photograph on readers are potentially important and complex, both in representing and teaching the National Geographic audience about that relationship and perhaps allowing for a kind of identification with the Westerner in the photo and through that allowing for more intensive interaction or imaginary participation in the photo.
Throughout the years National Geographic has been publishing articles on the non-Western world. Their photographs show the westerners engaged in a variety of activities: they view the local landscape from atop a hill, hold and closely study an artifact, show a local tribal person some wonder of Western technology, such as a photograph, mirror or the camera itself, or interact with a native, in conversation, work or play.
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The pictures of westerners can serve a validating function by proving that the author/photographer was there. The reader can be convinced that the account is a first hand one, brought from the field rather then from the archives.
Whether or not Westerners appear in the picture, we 'are' there, but in pictures that include a Westerner, we may see ourselves being viewed by the other, and we become conscious of ourselves and relationships. The act of seeing the self being seen is antithetical to the voyeurism which many art critics have identified as intrinsic to most photography and film
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THE REFRACTED GAZE OF THE OTHER
(To see themselves as others see them )
The film theorist Christian Metz made an analogy between the cinema screen and a mirror (Metz 1975), arguing that through identifying with the gaze of the camera, the cinema spectator re-enacts what the psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan called 'the mirror stage', a stage at which looking into the mirror allows the infant to see itself for the first time as other - a significant step in ego formation.
Extending this observation to still photography, in a small number of National Geographic issues, a native is shown with a camera or mirror. These are both tools of self-reflection and surveillance. Each creates a double of the self, a second figure who can be examined more closely than the original — a double that can also be alienated from the self, taken away, as a photograph can be, to another place. For many Americans, self knowledge is a central life goal. On the other hand, there is a childish naivety when a native gets to see his reflection.
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There have been changes, Take a look at this photo, where the Indians may have stood unwillingly for photographs they are now charging 80 cents a person as they pose. It depicts the act of looking at unwilling subjects, suggesting two things. The first, voyeurism of the photograph of the exotic. The camera gaze is doubled in this picture, not the native subject as in the photos above where the camera enters the frame in some explicit sense, and this doubling underlines the western gaze.
Success in avoiding boredom is key to retaining readers interest the photographer is always trying to colonise new experiences or find new ways to look at familiar subjects–to fight against boredom. For boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other. Thus, images are constructed rather than found in some cases.
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THE ACADEMIC SPECTATOR
This gaze is simply a sub-type of the readers gaze. We read a National Geographic magazine with a sense of astonishment and wonder, both as children and, in a way that is different only some of the time as adults.
We aim to make pictures tell a different story than they were originally meant to tell, one about their makers and readers, rather than their subjects.
This seventh kind of looking is guided by the idea that an alternative gaze is possible, one which is less dominating, more orientating toward seeing how a scene and its viewer might be changed than toward its imagined essential, unchanging and unsatisfactory form.
As we are invited to dream in the photograph, we are also invited to forget and be lost in it.
Our reading theory has also tutored our gaze at the photographs in distinctive ways, it has told us how to understand the techniques by which they work. We are captured by the temptation to view the photographs as more real than the world or at least a substitute for it.
Through attention to the dynamic nature of these intersecting gazes, the photograph becomes less vulnerable to the change or illusion that it masks or stuffs and mounts the world, freezes the life out of a scene. While the gaze of the subject of the photograph might be fairly lost in the heavy criss crossing traffic of the often more privileged producers and consumers gazes, very contemporary stories of contestable power are told there nonetheless.
THE GAZE AND GENDER THEORY
Laura Mulvey discusses feminist film theory in relation to the gaze in her essay "Visual pleasure and narrative cinema". She focuses on way in which looking in patriarchal society is "split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects it's fantasy onto the female figure which is styled accordingly." Women are to be looked at and put on display; both the camera apparatus and the male gaze regulate their gaze and thus women can only identity with the self as an object. Mulvey concludes that the gendered gaze of the cinema systematically determines who sees and who is seen, and the gaze serves as an aggressive medium for male domination.
The gaze can also be seen by some as masculine. John Berger points out in his book Ways of Seeing (1972), contemporary gender ideologies and envisages men as active doers and women as passive presence, men by what they do to others and women by their attitudes towards themselves. (men act and women appear).
Both Mulvey and Berger alert us in the ways in which the position of the spectator has the potential to enhance or articulate the power of the observer over the observed.
The unique vision of the female spectator is explored, and seen as multiple because it can move between identification with the object and with the spectator in comparison to the male gaze. For example, there is no single masculine spectator position for viewing the ethnic representations in the National Geographic. While the image makers at National Geographic are overwhelmingly white and male, the magazine's readers come from a wide range of social positions within American society.
Laura Mulvey discusses feminist film theory in relation to the gaze in her essay "Visual pleasure and narrative cinema". She focuses on way in which looking in patriarchal society is "split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects it's fantasy onto the female figure which is styled accordingly." Women are to be looked at and put on display; both the camera apparatus and the male gaze regulate their gaze and thus women can only identity with the self as an object. Mulvey concludes that the gendered gaze of the cinema systematically determines who sees and who is seen, and the gaze serves as an aggressive medium for male domination.
The gaze can also be seen by some as masculine. John Berger points out in his book Ways of Seeing (1972), contemporary gender ideologies and envisages men as active doers and women as passive presence, men by what they do to others and women by their attitudes towards themselves. (men act and women appear).
Both Mulvey and Berger alert us in the ways in which the position of the spectator has the potential to enhance or articulate the power of the observer over the observed.
The unique vision of the female spectator is explored, and seen as multiple because it can move between identification with the object and with the spectator in comparison to the male gaze. For example, there is no single masculine spectator position for viewing the ethnic representations in the National Geographic. While the image makers at National Geographic are overwhelmingly white and male, the magazine's readers come from a wide range of social positions within American society.
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