week 1

In the interview “Visual Culture, Everyday Life, Difference, and Visual Literacy” Nicholas Mirzoeff further articulates some of his ideas about the field/framework of visual culture, which he describes as a blending together of aspects of art historical and film critical thought with cultural studies. Visual culture addresses the myriad of ways we interface with (and are inundated with) images & media in our daily lives, moving away from just considering formal spaces of looking like the cinema or the art gallery. He calls this kind of shift the “politics of the everyday” and takes seriously the practice of “vernacular watching”.

I was particularly interested in thinking about Mirzoeff’s ideas about what visibility might mean for political action, as he writes for example that “simply making [the atrocities at Abu Ghraib] visible [...] has not had the consequences one might have expected” (p. 23). This observation made me think about the role of witnessing, and how there is an assumption that seeing violence and abuse of power will directly translate into political action. In particular, I couldn’t stop thinking about what it means to bear witness to police killings repeatedly, and how sharing/spreading/consuming these images is not necessarily in itself an act of resistance. I wonder how to effectively translate the act of witness into political motivation and action (especially at a time when there is a concurrent movement calling for police body cameras, which places the camera in the hands of the police themselves to use and abuse at their own discretion…).  

Lastly, I’d be curious to talk about Mirzoeff’s notion of “disidentification”, and how we as individual viewers can try to question and challenge our own viewpoints, and “explore and negotiate the presumed normality of the West” (p. 27). I’m interested in how or if this idea of disidentification might connect to bell hook’s theory of the “oppositional gaze”.