Gaze

Summary

The lecture examines the gaze as a relationship of looking shaped by power, representation, and control. Its central questions are: Who is looking? Who is being looked at? Who controls how the image is seen?

Looking and the gaze

• Ordinary looking is something everyone does, but the gaze is structured and relational: it places someone in the position of looking and someone or something else in the position of being seen.
• A person can adjust a selfie for an imagined audience, perform for reality-TV cameras, or be monitored by CCTV. These situations differ in who controls the image and how visible that control is.
• The distinction is not simply about who has their eyes open. It concerns who controls the terms of visibility—through staging, camera placement, editing, publication, or data collection.

How perception organizes images

Drawing on Gestalt psychology, the lecture explains that perception actively groups and completes visual information rather than registering isolated details. These principles help shape how images guide attention:

• Similarity: Elements that share color, shape, or size appear to belong together.
• Proximity: Items placed near one another are perceived as related.
• Continuation: The eye follows an apparent line or movement, even when it is interrupted.
• Closure: Viewers mentally complete incomplete shapes.
• Figure–ground: A viewer may perceive the same image differently, switching between a foreground figure and its background.
• Prägnanz (simplicity): The mind tends to prefer the clearest, most stable interpretation of a complex scene.

Advertisers, filmmakers, interface designers, and retailers can use these tendencies to direct attention. Since perception is already active and selective, the lecture argues, the gaze is not neutral either: it adds cultural and political structures to what we see.

Major types of gaze

The lecture presents six analytical categories:

• Spectator’s gaze: The audience’s look at an image. A viewer’s interpretation is shaped by personal experience and context.
• Intradiegetic gaze: A look between characters within an image or film. Point-of-view and reaction shots can draw viewers into a character’s desire, fear, or curiosity.
• Direct gaze: A subject looks straight into the camera or at the viewer. This can feel intimate or confrontational; the same composition can serve different purposes in fashion photography and police mugshots.
• Camera gaze: The viewpoint produced by the camera’s position and angle. Low angles can make subjects seem powerful; high angles can diminish them. Games can merge the camera’s viewpoint with the player’s perspective.
• Averted gaze: A subject looks away. The lecture notes that advertising has often used this pose in gendered ways, presenting women as dreamy, modest, or available to be viewed.
• Editorial gaze: Editors, curators, and platform-ranking systems decide what gets selected, cropped, displayed, or recommended—often before an audience encounters it.

Gender, advertising, and the male gaze

• John Berger argues that European painting traditions often presented women for an assumed male viewer. His shorthand is that “men act and women appear.” He also argues that women can learn to monitor themselves as if seeing themselves through an observer’s eyes.
• Erving Goffman examines how advertising communicates gender through poses, including head or body tilts, reclining, and ritualized touching. These can portray women as more passive or available, while men are more often shown upright and active.
• Laura Mulvey, in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” argues that classical Hollywood cinema often gives men the role of acting and looking, while positioning women as images to be looked at. She links this structure to scopophilia, or pleasure in looking.
  • Voyeuristic looking involves observing someone from a position of distance and control.
  • Fetishistic looking fragments and idealizes a person through attention to body parts rather than presenting them as a whole.
• The lecture also notes a complication: the “final girl” in horror films can become an active figure who looks back and fights, challenging a simple account of women as passive images.

Challenges and extensions

The lecture stresses that the gaze is not a single, universal mechanism:

• bell hooks’s oppositional gaze describes critical looking from a position excluded by dominant representations, particularly the experience of Black women spectators. It refuses identification with both the controlling viewpoint and the image being objectified.
• Kaja Silverman questions whether female spectatorship can be reduced to passivity and considers more complex forms of visual pleasure.
• E. Ann Kaplan asks whether reversing who looks and who is looked at actually redistributes power, or merely swaps the roles. The lecture presents the “female gaze” as potentially more than a simple inversion of Mulvey’s model.
• Edward Said’s Orientalism applies the idea of the gaze to empire: Western representations can turn “the East” into an object to be observed, classified, and possessed.
• The lecture emphasizes that gender, race, colonial history, and class can shape the same image at the same time.

Social conventions and power

Looking rules vary by culture and context. Eye contact may be read as confidence, sincerity, respect, or aggression depending on the setting. Gendered expectations can also affect who is considered entitled to look and who is expected to avoid or endure being looked at. Courts, classrooms, and workplaces turn such conventions into informal measures of credibility, attention, or respect.

Photography, surveillance, and representation

• Susan Sontag argues that photographing someone can amount to appropriating them: an image can be owned, reproduced, and circulated beyond the subject’s control.
• Michel Foucault’s idea of the normalizing gaze connects visibility to institutional power. Drawing on Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, the lecture explains that the possibility of being watched can lead people to regulate themselves, even when they do not know whether anyone is watching.
• Photography can support surveillance and classification, but it can also document or bear witness. Its political meaning depends in part on who takes the image, for what purpose, and who controls its circulation.
• The lecture uses police identification photography and CCTV as examples of the tension between public safety, identification, and surveillance. It also contrasts contested documentary photography with images remembered as testimony to violence.

The gaze in contemporary visual culture

The lecture applies these ideas to current media and technologies:

• Beauty filters and mirror selfies encourage people to inspect and edit themselves for an imagined audience.
• Deepfakes and non-consensual synthetic images raise questions about appropriation and consent.
• Contemporary films and streaming series may deliberately expose or reverse familiar visual conventions, although whether this creates a genuinely different gaze remains open to debate.
• Social platforms create an algorithmic gaze: they track what users pause on or engage with and use that information to shape what they are shown next.
• Virtual influencers complicate the relationship further, as audiences may direct admiration and desire toward computer-generated figures.

The lecture concludes that there is no single answer to who looks or who holds power. The arrangement changes from image to image and platform to platform. The goal is not to stop looking, but to notice how looking is organized and who benefits from that organization.

Speakers and sources featured

Speaker

• One unnamed lecturer; no additional speakers are identifiable in the subtitles.

Theorists, scholars, and writers cited

• Max Wertheimer and Kurt Koffka — Gestalt psychology
• Jonathan Schroeder — the gaze as looking with power
• John Berger — Ways of Seeing
• Erving Goffman — gendered poses and ritualization in advertising
• Paul Messaris — internalized perspectives in visual media
• Laura Mulvey — “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”
• Sigmund Freud — scopophilia
• Carol Clover — the “final girl” in horror films
• bell hooks — the oppositional gaze
• Kaja Silverman — female spectatorship
• E. Ann Kaplan — gaze reversal and the female gaze
• Edward Said — Orientalism
• Susan Sontag — photography and appropriation
• Michel Foucault — the normalizing gaze
• Jeremy Bentham — the Panopticon
• Alphonse Bertillon — police identification photography

Works, media, and examples mentioned

• Paintings by Titian, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, and Édouard Manet
• Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window
• Gone with the Wind, Magic Mike, the Twilight films, and Get Out
• Disney’s Aladdin; Big Brother and India’s Bigg Boss
• James Bond films, Michael Bay’s Transformers films, and Barbie
• Promising Young Woman and Bridgerton
• The Dove “Real Beauty” campaign
• National Geographic’s 1985 Afghan refugee cover photograph
• Photography by Diane Arbus and Nick Ut
• Instagram, TikTok, Netflix, CCTV, dating apps, and virtual influencers