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Ways of Seeing

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Course Type Course Code No. Of Credits
Discipline Core NA 4

Semester and Year Offered: Monsoon

Course Coordinator and Team: Dr. Sandip K. Luis and Dr. Santhosh S.

Email of course coordinator: sandipkluis@gmail.com and santhoshs@aud.ac.in

Pre-requisites: None

Aim: The title of the course is indebted to the pioneering and influential work on visual

culture by John Berger, Ways of Seeing, episodes of which were originally broadcast by BBC and soon published as a book in 1972. Drawing on his work, this course is imagined as an introduction to the diverse field of the world of images (or visual-cultural-world), and attempts to engage with multiple methodologies, approaches, and positionalities regarding this diversity. Broadly following Berger’s structure of analysis, this course looks at the world of images with a new and critical eye, while keeping in frame the historical as well as the most mundane and ordinary aspects of visual culture.

Objectives:

  • This course introduces students to the heterogeneous world of visual culture, keeping in mind the overbearing presence of it in our everyday life experiences and practices.
  • This course attempts to map the development of visual culture in the Euro-American world primarily through art historical methodologies.
  • Similarly, it explores the peculiar manifestations of visual culture in the South Asian context, keeping in mind its postcolonial legacy and the proliferation of popular visual culture in the domain of the ‘sacred’.
  • The course also works as a practical guide to the modes, modalities and technologies of visual communication by analysing the specific semantic and affective dimensions of these processes of communication.
  • This course introduces the ideological undercurrents of visual culture through initiating critiques from various subject-positions, and the way that these undercurrents shape and manipulate our outlooks, experiences, expressions and tastes

Course Outcomes: Upon the successful completion of the course, students will be able to:

  • Develop demonstrable skills in analysing specific aspects of visual communication and its definitive role in knowledge production.
  • Critically review the role of visual culture in a capitalist economy and its wide-ranging ramifications in our everyday life practices and interactions.
  • Initiate an informed discussion about the multiple critiques of visual culture from the point of view of gender, race, caste, and so on.
  • Systematically illustrate the quantitative and qualitative differences that appear in the domain of visual culture due to technological mediations, especially in the context of analog and digital technology.
  • Demonstrate (in verbal, written or visual forms) the heterogeneous character of visual culture and their aesthetical, ideological, and the socio-political implications.
  • Systematically distinguish between an image and a picture, and between their various epistemological and sensorial differences.
  • Develop a systematic perspective on the politics of looking and the constructed character of our very act of seeing.

Brief description of modules/ Main modules:

 

Module

Weeks

1

Introduction to Visual Culture: How to See the World

2

2

Communication: Verbal and Visual

1

3

The ‘World’ of ‘Perspective’

1

4

The Art of Portraiture: From Self-Portraiture to ‘Selfie’

2

5

Production of Nature: the Art of Landscapes

2

6

Gazing the World: Gender, Race, and Representation

2

7

Popular Visual Culture in/and India

3

 

Assessment Details with weights:

  • First Assignment: End of Third Week - take home exercise - Submission time: Within one week. Theme: based on the discussion around visual and verbal communication, an analytical test will be initiated through some prominent artistic interventions in this domain. Eg. Rene Magritte’s This is Not a Pipe or Joseph Kosuth’s One and the Three Chairs. (15%)
  • Second Assignment: End of 5th to 6th Week: Photography based research project around the theme of portrait, self-portrait and selfie and the question of perspective. (30%)
  • Third Assignment: End of 8th Week, Photography and drawing based research project on Landscape. (15%)
  • End-Term Examination/Assignment (40%)

Indicative reading list:

  • John Berger, Ways of seeing, Part II, London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books, 1972
  • John Berger, Ways of Seeing, British Broadcasting Corporation, (screening) Nicholas Mirzeoff, How to See the World, London: Pelican, 2015.
  • W.J.T. Mitchell (ed.), Landscape and Power, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2nd edition, 2002.
  • Heather Houser, 'The aesthetics of environmental visualization: More than information ecstasy', Public Culture, 26.2 (73), 2014.
  • Gillian Rose, “Psychoanalysis: visual culture, visual pleasure, visual disruption” from Visual Methodologies, London: Sage Publications, 2016. (pp. 100-134)
  • Kajri Jain, Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.
  • Christopher Pinney, Photos of the Gods: The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004.
  • Gary Tartakov, Dalit Art and Visual Imagery, New Delhi: Oxford University Press: 2012.
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