Chapter One

Comments on the reading of Chapter One from “Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture” by Sturken and Cartwright:

-We look to make sense of the world around us. Even those who are blind or have no vision daily recognize the importance of viewing the world around us—looking doesn’t simply include vision but also hearing and touching. As someone with poor vision, I can agree with that particular statement. Looking is a social practice, and we are so conditioned to look at things every second of our life that we aren’t even aware the importance of it without conscious effort.

- We construct meanings to whatever we see. The way we construct meaning is shaped by different things including our own experience and the culture we live in. Images are not simply copies of something, but our perception of those images determines and changes their meanings.

- Photographs aren’t “visual truth.” Photography is a medium that can be as easily manipulated as any other visual medium. This is growing increasingly evident with such programs as PhotoShop. Our tendency to think that photographic/film pictures are truthful is slightly surprising considering today’s proclivity for movies that are completely manipulated and fictional – we recognize that these images are fictional, but we still tend to believe that other images are more factual because they are not called “movies” when in reality they can be just as easily doctored.

- Photographs are extremely common in today’s world. They are used both to express individuality but also in a repressive fashion as when used in the cataloguing of citizens. Today, portraits images are used for identification purposes in many different areas. Surveillance cameras are also a factor that sometimes escapes our daily thought about how an image of our identity is captured.

- “Signals” are composed of an image/sound/word known as a “signifier” and the meaning of the image/sound/word known as the “signified.”

-I find it extremely interesting that Chris Crocker has officially reached enough fame to be included in one of my college textbooks.


Also, my reasons for choosing this particular theme for my blog are as follows:
I think that this theme is clean looking and professional while still being visually stimulating—not too plain or boring to look at. Also the color scheme is not distracting to the posts while being more interesting than plain black and white. Not only is blue my favorite color, it is also a very naturally calming color and, for lack of a better word, I feel that this theme has a “calm” feel, which I liked.