This week you had a choice between several readings: excerpts from Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida; two essays from Barthes’s Image/Music/Text; excerpts from John Berger’s Appearances; two chapters from Berger’s Ways of Seeing; or Laura Mulvey’s seminal essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.”
These readings, which draw on semiotics (Barthes & Berger), Marxist thought (Berger), and pyschoanalytic approaches to feminism (Berger & Mulvey), will give us some useful concepts and terms for thinking about how photographs and audiences interact. The authors are all concerned with what images do. How do they communicate to us? How do they affect how we see ourselves and our world? How do they influence how we see their subjects?
For your response this week, think about which concept(s) from the reading you chose struck you as most important for understanding how images affect viewers.