Gaze
[8Jan21 I&P p.81] A number of gazes are listed in the course material - the designations are repeated below with my interpretation of the meaning
spectator’s gaze – the viewer looking at a subject image
internal gaze – one subject looking at another
direct address – the subject looking at the lens
the look of the camera – the photographer through the camera
the bystander’s gaze – the viewer of the image being viewed themselves
the averted gaze – the subject not looking at the lens
the audience gaze – the image contains both a subject and a crowd looking at that subject
the editorial gaze, I'll quote directly, 'the whole ‘institutional’ process by which a proportion of the photographer’s gaze is chosen and emphasised'
At this point the concept of gaze(s) seems to be a descriptor that can be used in analysing a photograph, useful, but no more so than, say, the Spense & Martin approach to portraits.
The list originates from Daniel Chandler’s Notes on ‘The Gaze’ (1998) which Salkeld (2018, p.106) summarises as:
of the viewer at an image
of a person
of one depicted at another within the image
the one depicted “looking ‘out of the frame’ as if at the viewer, with associated gestures and postures”
the look of the camera, “by association, the gaze of the photographer”.
Chandler himself notes four additional, lesser, gazes, a bystander watching the viewer (attributed to Willemen 1992); a deliberately averted gaze on the part of the depicted subject (Dyer 1982); the audience within the frame gazing at the depicted subject; and the editorial gaze (Lutz & Collins 1994). Chandler also lists ten gazes ‘at a figurative painting in a gallery’ from John Ellis, Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video (1982): these are repeated below for ease of reference [1].
Salkeld (2018, p.108) concentrates on the ‘gendered gaze’ tracing the notion through Simone de Beauvoir, Berger and Mulvey (see below) and notes that representation of historic male / female stereotypes serves to reinforce and perpetuate those assumed roles.
Box A
Helmut Newton
Self-Portrait with Wife and Models,
'Vogue' Studios, Paris, 1980
Bull (2010, p.54) gives the rich example of Helmut Newton's 1980s images deploying complex panoplies of gazes, such as figure A1. Bulgin discussed this in a 1992 essay, Perverse Space and Bull states that this ‘complicated the model of the male / active and female / passive gaze’ from Bulgin’s earlier Looking at Photographs.
Looking at this image, we have the model’s averted gaze, but only in reflection; she might actually be looking at June Newton (née Browne. aka June Brunell aka Alice Springs) with a returned internal gaze. Helmut, meanwhile, is directing the look of the camera to the mirror and therefore, indirectly, turning his male gaze onto a naked woman (while wearing a raincoat) Bull notes that the original four views defined by Bulgin in Looking at Photographs (derived from Laura Mulvey’s Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, 1975) are:
Box B
Jemima Stehli
Self Portrait with Karen, 2000
from onthisdateinphotography.com
the look of the camera at the scene / subject / event etc.: the look at the viewer at the resulting image; the looks of subjects at each other and / or objects; and (added by Bulgin for still photography because characters rarely address the audience in film) a look of the subject(s) towards the camera and thereby the viewer.
Later (p.57), Bull draws attention to Jemima Stehli’s response to Newton’s picture, Self Portrait with Karen, 2000, figure B1.
The course material does not mention that in addition to a purely descriptive use, the concept of gaze has been weaponised by a variety of socio-political movements and that has redefined and energised the concept. Feminism and anti-imperialism are the two principal causes involved and these name and shame 1. the male gaze in contrast to the female gaze and 2. the imperialist, colonial and tourist gazes. A search of JSTOR entries using the term gaze offers:
Looking for the Other: Feminism, Film and the Imperial Gaze, E. Ann Kaplan, 1997;
Surviving the White Gaze: A Memoir, Rebecca Carroll, 2021;
Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race in America, George Yancy, 2016;
African Cinemas: Decolonizing the Gaze, Olivier Barlet, 2000;
The Female Gaze: Women As Viewers of Popular Culture, Lorraine Gamman and Margaret Marshment, 2018;
The Tourist Gaze, John Urry and Jonas Larsen, 2011.
The only example to hand (apart from the course textbook, Angier's Train your gaze) is Jansen's Girl on Girl (2017), in which Zing Tsjeng's foreword (p.7) states,
A woman taking a photograph of a woman isn't just performing a political act; it is also a powerful act of imagination. If each picture taken creates an image of a new reality, then this is one that suggests the exclusion of men. The photograph may allude to masculinity, but both its gaze and subject remain female. If the male gaze is thought to be toxic, the female gaze is a corrective. It is a perfect, virtuous circle, and entirely natural. Zing Tsjeng's foreword to Girl on Girl , Jansen, 2017, p.7
and from Zanele Muholi, the first contributor, a sentence extracted in the book itself,
It's about claiming the spaces, taking back power, owning our voices and our selves and our bodies, without fear of being judged. Zanele Muholi, Girl on Girl , Jansen, 2017, p.11
In terms of the gazes in the original list, this concerns mainly the look of the camera and the spectator’s gaze and probably the editorial gaze.
The treatment of subjects in pornography (and those subjects were, anecdotally, overwhelmingly women photographed by men) was a significant contributing factor in the development of feminist politics from the 1970s onwards. Similarly, the treatment of ethnic cultures largely by white photographers white photographers (with the resources to allow leisured travel), from the earliest years of the medium through to National Geographic magazine in the twentieth century (stocked by my school library in the 1960s and many others, I'm sure) and on to today in many media outlets, was and is patronising (a recent controversy has been Comic Relief's ‘white saviour’ appeal films, Burt, 2020). Casting the net with hindsight, it is clear that such considerations should also be applied to the treatment of working class fishing industry workers and the working class in general and the FSA’s photographing of displaced farmers, as controlled and instructed by Roy Stryker.
It is, then, entirely justified that many (or perhaps most, even all) groups object to the way they are portrayed by others. It can be intrinsically offensive and can encourage or reinforce prejudices in those who view it.
1. Playboy, December 1953
2. National Geographic, March 1971
3. Newhaven fishwife, 1843–47, David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson
4. Arthur Rothstein. Farmer and sons in dust storm, Cimarron County, Oklahoma, 1936
© the artists, their agents or their estates
image 1 from gq.com; 2 from gal-dem.com; 3 from The Met; 4. from Gernsheim, 1962 p.215
While these identifications of inappropriate gazes are applied to legitimate and longstanding grievances, it is nevertheless the case that they tend to attribute widespread bad (or malformed) intentions, based on particular and partial interpretations of the past. While this may be an understandable reaction to prejudice and mistreatment, it is demonstrably illogical. Consider pairs of plausibly identical photographs taken by two photographers on opposite sides of these various divides. These could be:
an unclothed model photographed by a male and female student in a life portrait class;
photographs of the Taj Mahal or a Cuban street scene taken by a tourist and by a local resident.
If the male, colonial and tourist gazes are real, widespread and unavoidable, then it would not be possible for these pairs of photographs to coexist. In truth, accusations of the application of harmful gazes can only be attributed to a particular image once the identity and background of the photographer is known: until then, it is entirely in the subjective interpretation of the viewer. Once again, that is not to deny that great harm has been inflicted on many groups according to gender, race, ethnicity, location, social standing and many other attributes, it is merely to assert that this cannot necessarily be read into a photograph. There are exceptions to this, of course, for example images of violence, be that sexual, social, racial, political or of any other kind will likely evidence bad intent on some part, but while a pornographer is almost certainly manifesting a harmful male gaze, a journalist photographing an interracial conflict might well be seeking to end it through publicity.
[26Jan] Writing in 1991, anthologised in 1995, A.D. Coleman said of gaze,
Postmodernism's hostility to and fear of the faculty of sight is a matter of public record. "The gaze," a purportedly ancient, secret technique of domination hitherto practiced only by men, has been widely identified and demonized as a modern version of the "evil eye." The literature abounds with snide references to "scopophilia," a pejorative neologism that translates as "the love of looking"; in this construct, the very act of seeing stands frequently accused of inherent, pathological voyeurism, with photography as its most pernicious instrument.
So far as I'm aware, no one professing these convictions has had the courage to follow the pertinent Biblical injunction, "If thine eye offend thee, cast it out." But small wonder that the art around which this theory circles offers so little that rewards visual attention; in a climate of such hysterical revulsion at optical experience, who would want to be caught giving or receiving pleasure via the retina? A.D. Coleman, Critical Focus, 1995, p.97
Back to the cmat [I&P pp.81-2], which seeks, unconvincingly in my view, to combine gazes and windows by examining various versions of memory (or self-generated pseudo memory) triggered by images.
John Berger in Ways of Seeing and Marianne Hirsch in Family Frames are quoted, concluding that there is a form of communication through a 'window in time' between a viewer with a spectator’s gaze trained on a portrait subject with the direct address.
Hirsch uses the term postmemory arising from a 'imaginative investment' (Hirsch, Family Frames, p.22 quoted in the cmat) for what seems to be an invented memory by the viewer, triggered by an image. The term associated memory might be more sensible.
The cmat goes on to Henri Bergson who distinguished between routine, habitual memory such as, I suppose, driving a known route, and pure memory which relates to a specific instance or event that (it quotes Bertrand Russell) 'cannot be altered' — mind you, many favourite memories and stories are embellished in the retelling and in the musing remembrance.
[once spellchecked to here]
Two more extensive quotes from Keith Roberts, There/Then: Here/Now (n.d) which itself quotes Livingston & Dyer, 2010, A View From the Window: Photography, recording family memories, to the effect that photographs can trigger memories not only of the family's past but also of more general events that impacted on family history. Second from Hirsch again stating that postmemories can also involve the histories and experiences of previous generations. This is touching upon the Tina Campt's notion of haptic images covered in Part 1.
Just a reminder to myself that this all concerns windows and gaze. Part 3 started with the quote,
To gaze implies more than to look at – it signifies a psychological relationship of power, in which the gazer is superior to the object of the gaze. Schroeder. J, in Barbara B Stern, Representing Consumers: Voices, Views and Visions (1998) London: Routledge. Pg 208
An example of memory triggers in another medium is Gunter Demnig's stolpersteine (stumbling block) in Berlin, memorials to those subjected to Nazi persecution. The lack of pertinent information here might trigger a more generalised evocation of the past.
Notes
1 Daniel Chandler (1998) quotes James Elkins ten different ways of looking at a figurative painting in a gallery (Elkins 1996, 38-9):
- 1. You, looking at the painting,
- 2. figures in the painting who look out at you,
- 3. figures in the painting who look at one another, and
- 4. figures in the painting who look at objects or stare off into space or have their eyes closed. In addition there is often
- 5. the museum guard, who may be looking at the back of your head, and
- 6. the other people in the gallery, who may be looking at you or at the painting. There are imaginary observers, too:
- 7. the artist, who was once looking at this painting,
- 8. the models for the figures in the painting, who may once have seen themselves there, and
- 9. all the other people who have seen the painting - the buyers, the museum officials, and so forth. And finally, there are also
- 10. people who have never seen the painting: they may know it only from reproductions... or from descriptions.