Vision and the Gaze

This paper is a survey on different strategies used by Roman artists to produce meta-figurative effects. It deals with four questions: 1/ how relieves on a couple of Augustan altars managed to perform a mise en abyme, 2/ how famous works of art were “quoted” on a Pompeian fresco (house of Venus in the Shell), 3/ if Roman painters explored self-portraiture and 4/ how they varied reflections on painted mirrors considering the gender of the reflected subject. This first survey throws light on the way Roman image-makers have explored a large panel of meta-figuration: they comment their own technique through these images that must be studied considering the time they were performed by the gaze of their different viewers, and the time they were perpetuated through ages.

It is widely accepted that Abbas Kiarostami’s cinema revolves around the representation of the gaze. Many critics argue that he should be considered a late modernist who repeats the self-reflexive gestures of modernist European cinema decades after they were first introduced. The present paper will contradict this assertion by investigating the problematic of the Kiarostamian gaze and analyzing the perceptual side of the act of looking. I will argue that instead of focusing on the gaze of the spectator directed towards the filmic image, he exposes a gaze that is fully integrated into the reality to be captured on film. The second part of the paper will explain this by linking the concept of gaze to the Lacanian concept of the order of the Real. Finally, I will contextualize all this by discussing the Iranian director’s position between Eastern and Western traditions of representation.

As death becomes an important trope in photography theory, immortality stands as a hidden layer of the complex relationships between humans and images. While nowadays, in the Western tradition, one might feel uncomfortable to speak about immortality, in the past, before the modern constrangements of rationality, it was popular the belief that the soul could live eternally. While in the past people transcended space and time through religion, nowadays it is images that allow us to move from an innerwordly to an otherworldly position by “mechanically repeating what could never be repeated existentially” (Barthes, 1980; 4 ).
Essaying through three different possibilities and supported by theory (namely Roland Barthes, Barbie Zelizer, W.G. Sebald and Susan Sontag among others), this paper will speak about the relationship between images and immortality, and the connections that could be established between memory, imagination, emotion and contingency.

Drawing together the concerns of both feminist theory and science studies, this article pairs the scientific writings of Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud in order to read how both of their origin stories—one of species life and the other of psychology—are grappling with the status of sexual difference as it was constituted through scientific narrative. Reading Charles Darwin’s 1871 The Descent of Man for its narrative about sexual selection and Sigmund Freud’s account of the origins of sexual difference, I reveal the way that these two great scientific thinkers interestingly route both of their narratives of sexual difference through the interplay of a specifically female gaze. Both Darwin and Freud’s scientific observations deal with sexual difference and its consequences, and both unexpectedly develop a narrative that positions the female as the watcher, the observer, the looker. This article thus has three aims: first, it affirms a genealogical approach to scientific narratives that understands Darwin’s natural science as a significant antecedent to Freud’s human psychology. Second, it participates in literary critical scholarship that reads the work of each scientist in terms of narrative. Third, it argues that these narratives both articulate theories of sexual difference by and through the operations of a specifically female gaze. By thinking sexual difference and scientific narrative together, this article contributes to the important body of scholarship that explores the relationship between science and the humanities.

In his 2005 film The Willow Tree (Bīd-i Majnūn), Majid Majidi offers a complex moral commentary on the faculty of sight. To do so, the filmmaker draws from Sufi theories of gazing, in which desire must be for ultimate meaning (maʿnā), as conveyed through the vehicle of perceivable form (ṣūra), a distinction with both metaphysical and ethical implications. Majidi presents sight, when devoid of contemplation, as a sort of voyeurism, especially in contrast to the privacy and immediacy of speech and especially within the context of the modern city. Moreover, his use of a blind protagonist whose sight is suddenly restored makes Jacques Lacan’s (d. 1981) psychoanalysis an especially useful tool for understanding the implications of Majidi’s film: In Majidi, much as in Lacan, the gaze undoes barriers and a sense of self-mastery, arousing the protagonist’s obsession with the void and an insatiable desire. Through references to Sufi ethical writings and a protagonist morally defeated by the image-centric media of contemporary urban Iran, The Willow Tree explores problems of representation and commodity fetishism. The resolution is a response to what might be called “moral voyeurism” that highlights and laments the artificiality of modernity’s objects of desire.

INFORMATION: Zargar, Cyrus A. (2020) "The Gaze and a Sufi Ethics of Vision in Majidi’s The Willow Tree: Form, Meaning, and the Real," Journal of Religion & Film: Vol. 24 : Iss. 1 , Article 55. AT:

https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/jrf/vol24/iss1/55/

The settlement archaeology pioneered by Robert McCormick Adams extended the scope of archaeological investigations to a regional scale, an approach that has been continued in recent years in landscape archaeology. An array of new technologies for recognizing, visualizing, and analyzing data has considerably expanded the possibilities for documenting and presenting the remains of ancient settlements and land use. Relatively unexamined, however, are the broader implications accompanying these large-scale perspectives, including the extensive use of remote sensing technologies. In this paper, we examine a number of the political and ethical issues raised by these perspectives and scales. We suggest that an extension of the goals of regional-based approaches can bring with it new insights into the politics, economic and ecological problems associated with archaeological research that implicates modern landscapes and their inhabitants.

It. Sguardo; Fr. Regard; Germ. Blick; Span. Mirada. Theories of the gaze, especially since the 1970s and 80s, have enjoyed particular fortune in three main fields of knowledge: art history, psychoanalysis (starting from Lacan in particular) and reflections on the relationship between the gaze and alterity, in their various declinations within the fields of gender studies, feminist studies and postcolonial studies (Elkins 2010; Pinotti, Somaini 2016). Moreover, studies of the gaze have become closely linked to the birth and development of the Visual culture studies. Aside from the different instruments and methods of research and in the absence of a unitary definition of the concept, the notion of the gaze, as opposed to the simple physiological and natural exercise of the eye, defines a historical, cultural and political mode of observation and reception of images by active observing subjects.

This chapter investigates Palestinian and Babylonian "visual eros" by considering the gendering of vision in the realm of desire. Tracing through different themes ranging from: "genitalia and the gender of the gaze," to "visual asceticism," and then to "beautiful men," the chapter situates rabbinic desire across Palestine and Babylonia and in conversation with Greco-Roman and Christian trends.

Just as visions of God triggered anxieties about sexuality and idolatry, so too did the rabbis construct a visual opposition, in certain circumstances, between the erotic and the sacred in the field of vision. Even if looking at  the  divine  was  dangerous,  it  was  laudatory  in  ways  that  looking  at sexually arousing entities was not. Yet, it quickly becomes apparent that the rabbis thought in highly gendered terms about seeing sexually. Rabbinic ideas about visual erotics, particularly in the context of prohibition and visual asceticism, seem at first glance to rest on a basic binary: a gendered distribution of visual labor, with a masculine, penetrative gaze and a feminine visual object. Yet, the concerns triggered by the sexual gaze and the possible solution of male visual asceticism themselves had curious consequences. Withdrawing from the world of visual eros turned unseeing rabbis into visual objects desired by women, by other rabbis, and by gentile men and women. This effectively troubled a simple binary division of visual and erotic labor. Amidst these sexual dramas, we see that just as the visualization of God was shaped by the politics of a post-temple world and life under the Roman Christian imperium, so too did their cultural and political circumstances impact the rabbis’ sense of their own visible desirability.

It is widely accepted that Abbas Kiarostami’s cinema revolves around the representation of the gaze. Many critics argue that he should be considered a late modernist who repeats the self-reflexive gestures of
modernist European cinema decades after they were first introduced. The present paper will contradict this assertion by investigating the problematic of the Kiarostamian gaze and analyzing the perceptual side of the act of looking. I will argue that instead of focusing on the gaze of the spectator directed towards the filmic image, he exposes a gaze that is fully integrated into the reality to be captured on film. The second part of the paper will explain this by linking the concept of gaze to the Lacanian concept of the order of the Real. Finally, I will contextualize all this by discussing the Iranian director’s position between Eastern and Western traditions of representation.

Esta comunicación explora la mirada pintoresca en las litografías de la España artística y monumental (1842-1850) como un código de reconocimiento de la realidad y capaz de generar significados. Se argumenta que estas litografías son intermediarias entre el espectador y una realidad mediatizada por los discursos prevalentes en la época acerca de la naturaleza, el gótico, la identidad nacional y la experiencia estética.

NB El texto de la comunicación incluye numerosos pasajes en cursiva ajenos a las intenciones del autor y no deben ser considerados como énfasis intencionados.

This paper explores the picturesque gaze in the lithographs from España artística y monumental (1842-1850), as a code for recognizing reality and able to generate meaning. It is argued that these lithographs are intermediaries between the viewer and a reality whose conception in mediated by prevalent discourses on nature, the Gothic style, national identity, and the aesthetic experience.

NB The text includes numerous passages in italics that were not intended by the author and should be disregarded as intentional emphasis in the construction of the arguments.

In the cult of María Lionza (Venezuela), the look or gaze constitutes a fundamental aspect of the ritual process, since it is one of the privileged ways through which the relations between spirits, mediums and participants are established. The use of the camera as a research method helps to gain a better understanding of this issue, since the action of holding a camera – and looking through it – may provoke comments and reactions among believers, resulting in a process by which a set of assumptions about the meaning of seeing and being seen that usually remain implicit become explicit. Most of the time, these newly explicit assumptions appear as visual prohibitions or as a consequence of a mistake made by the researcher. What I defend in this paper is that ‘visual mistakes’ and prohibitions are very valuable in anthropological research and should be taken into account. The text concludes with two general reflections: one about the connection between cinema and the sacred, and the other about the intimate relationship between what we usually call ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ in visual anthropology.

William Hogarth equated the experience of inspecting a beautiful painting to that of a
walk along a pleasantly meandering path:

the eye hath this sort of enjoyment in winding walks, and serpentine rivers, and
all sorts of objects, whose forms, as we shall see hereafter, are composed principally
of what I call waving and serpentine lines. Intricacy in form, therefore, I
shall define to be that peculiarity in the lines, which compose it, that leads the
eye a wanton kind of chase, and form the pleasure that gives the mind, entitles
it to the name of beautiful.

It was only in the early twentieth century that actual eye movements could be
accurately observed and such claims empirically tested. The foundational work was
educational psychologist Guy Buswell’s 1935 publication How People Look at Pictures:
A Study of the Psychology of Perception in Art.

Nowadays the images from our recent Soviet past become more distant—not only in terms of time, but the context becomes less and less obvious as a consequence of time passing. The ability to understand the meanings of images and distinguish between Soviet and non-Soviet is determined not only by the content of a photograph, but also by the viewer’s experience. The fashion photographs from the late Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) is a good example on that score. Specific soviet cultural experiences appearing through borrowed Western patterns can be recognized through the small details like a pose, a gaze and a backdrop, as well as through the materiality of the print itself. The attempt to fix one’s gaze and make one’s way through the many layers of the image, conditioned both by its content and its material characteristics, gives another opportunity to interact with the recent past.