Seeing is Believing

When it comes to most of our senses, humans are poor seconds to most other mammals. Our range of hearing can’t capture the high pitches a dog’s can — and as for smell, there the comparison worsens: dogs, who have stereoscopic smell (thanks to two independent olfactory nerves, one for each nostril) can quickly sense both the smell and its location, might justifiably regard us as scarcely able to smell at all. Yet when it comes to sight — to vision — humans are in their element; though owls may see better at night, the centrality of our visual cortex seems to focus our entire mind.

In part for this reason — but also because, from Neolithic times, humans have made art, from cave paintings to figurines to jewelry — the visual element of human culture is perhaps its most significant element. And yet, until fairly recently, this central aspect of our humanity has been relegated to art history courses, which themselves have often been regarded as the least interesting of classes, even by art students. Perhaps the students aren’t to be blamed, as most such classes consisted of slide after side of rapid-fire, identify-the-period images — what was missing was the the interconnectivity between image, form, text, and culture, not just isolated movements — and this is what the emerging field of visual culture aims to do.

The field has had its growing pains. At times, its juxtapositions between the visual and the cultural can seem glib, or like stretching things too far, After all, how much can a cheery child’s face in a advertisement tell us about the cultural construction of gender or domesticity? More than one might think, of course, but only when placed in the fullest possible context of other cultural images and practices. With the Victorian era, we’re immensely fortunate that so much of its imagery — as well as its books, newspapers, and ephemera — has been preserved, and (thanks to the copyrights having expired) digitized and made freely available.

In so many ways, we remain the inheritors of Victorian impulses: the era saw the birth of mass consumer culture, the invention of the fax machine, the telegraph, the  telephone, photography, and film — and our fascination with “virtual” reality was already full-blown by the early nineteenth century. Victorians lined to take “virtual” trips by means of “moving panoramas”; they stared into stereopticon viewers at 3D imagery of exotic locations around the world; the mounted cameras on the front of trains and watched the resulting film with as much interest as we do some Go-Pro footage of a bungee jumper. They wished to expand their world by pictorial means, and they did so — and we are in and of that world today.

So, as a sort of practice — take this advertisement for Chivers jellies. Read it, using all the different perspectives you can muster: semiotics, gender theory, and even just free association. Use Google’s image search function to see similar imagery, and look for parallels in our own time. Blake could see the world in a grain of sand: what can we see in a candy wrapper? Post your thoughts below.