ON NOT LOOKING:
Essays on Images and Viewers

Call for Papers

Submissions are invited for an edited book with the working title On
Not Looking: Essays on Images and Viewers. Contemporary experience
presents us with a contradiction: while we are at a historical moment
when images have never been so readily available and circulated, we
increasingly "don't look" at images. The collection will explore the
myriad ways that not looking at images - as opposed to not seeing - is
manifest in our burgeoning image culture today.

Contributions are sought that address practices and representations of
"not looking," "turning away," and other manifestations of physical
and mental distraction from material images. Our relationship to the
glut of images that saturate the world is characterized by an ever-
expanding contemporary form of iconoclasm. Again and again, while
documentary images are touted as a reliable form of visible evidence,
or as commensurate with the every day life they depict - due to their
apparent mimeticism and their potential to be seen simultaneous with
the event - we don't trust them, we question them, we continually go
back to written words as a way of understanding and confirming what we
have seen. This scepticism involves a looking away from the image.
Even as the means of production become increasingly available, even as
images are exhibited, published, seen and watched everywhere, we are
either discouraged to turn away, or we are unable, or unwilling to
look at what is pictured before us.

Not looking often comes as a result of privileging the other senses.
Thus, we are directed to listen where we might want to look:in museums
and art galleries, institutions apparently devoted to the idolatory of
images, we are continually coaxed away from looking: we are enticed
into following the audio guide, reading the texts on the wall,
believing the written catalogue at the bookstore. Our eyes are
constantly distracted from the supposed purpose of our visit: to look.
Alternatively, looking with the eyes is devalued in the world of
virtual reality: touching, hearing, smelling, even tasting challenge
visual perception as the measure of our bodily experience of the
visual world. In another example, never before have the images that
document the modern battlefield been so abundant and readily available
- on television, the World Wide Web, Instant Messaging and so on. Yet,
again and again these images are censored, prohibited, manipulated and
disguised in an effort to quell their power and blind their audience.
Like the turn away from the deceptive documentary image as evidence,
the press and the powers they represent force us to look elsewhere for
the truth.

Despite the wont to "not look," to look away, to look elsewhere,
scholarship in the more traditional disciplines of art history, cinema
and media studies, and the relatively recent interdisciplinary fields
of visual and image studies have focussed on discussions of "practices
of looking" "how we see," and, for example, the precision of vision in
modernity. Within the fields of philosophy, psychoanalysis, and other
critical studies, scholarship tends to understand iconoclasm as a form
of blindness or metaphysical distraction, not seeing when we look.
Artists and imagemakers today, however, continue the preoccupation
with the habit of "not looking" "looking away," "turning elsewhere" in
analogue and digital media. On Not Looking will bring the concerns of
critics and philosophers together with those of artists and
imagemakers: the essays will reinstate the image to its position of
primacy in an interrogation of the contemporary tendency to look away.
As such, the anthology will contribute to ongoing debates about the
politics and aesthetics of looking, and better assess the role of
images, and our relationship to them, within contemporary history and
culture more generally.

The collection will be divided into a number of sections with essays
from different theoretical perspectives that focus on the image, and
our relationship to it, as sites of 'not looking". Potential areas to
be discussed might include: Politics of institutional exhibition and
perception of images (including museums, schools, prisons, and so on);
Censored, repressed, and banned images; Transformations to practices
of not looking as a result of new media interventions; The image in
history and memory; Not looking at images of bodies and cultures on
the margins; Religious and cultural prohibitions about looking at
certain types of images; Responses to images of trauma; Images in
everyday life (eg. Reality TV, the role of the image in travel and
tourism, YouTube interventions; advertising, home movies and family
photo albums); Embodied vision and visceral imagery (e.g. acts of
violence and the mutilated body); Political interventions (including
public protest, Photojournalism, ecological imagery, and so on).

Submissions that focus on a variety of material images are welcome.
These will include but are not limited to: painting, architecture,
film, photography, video, television, museum exhibitions, the World
Wide Web, cell phone images and the printed press. Essays that explore
contemporary images that follow our habit of not looking, as well as
the way older works have been revised and displayed within the
contemporary moment are sought.

All inquiries, and/or 400-500 word abstract, and current CV can be
sent to Frances Guerin: fjgueringmail.com by December 15, 2009. Full
essays of 5,000-7,500 words will be due September 30, 2010