How to see the world

Nicholas Mirtsov, a professor of media, culture and communication at new york University, is one of the founders of visual culture, and is the author of Introduction to Visual Culture and Reader of Visual Culture. His book "Watching Babylon" discusses the Iraq war in the form of film and television, and is praised by art historian Terry Smith as "the wonderful work of the pioneer of visual culture analysis with the most originality and the widest vision in the world today".

About this book

Now, we look at ourselves, others and all kinds of things every day, trapped in the sea of Wang Yang, but once upon a time, a person didn't even have a portrait of himself all his life. How did we get here? This is exactly what How to See the World tells us and analyzes it for us. This book aims to clarify how we sort out these changes and understand their significance to our visual world.

Core content

People who learn to look at themselves liberate their self-awareness and shake the privilege of minority control; People who learn to see the city have broadened their horizons and new pursuits have emerged in their lives; Movies and TV have recreated a virtual and real image world next to the real world, and screens and TV screens have laid the foundation for the emergence of smart phones. Tracing back to history, the author tells us that every change has the significance of revolution or liberation.

order

Maybe your ears are working, but your eyes are definitely not idle. You may be driving, or you may be brushing your circle of friends with your mobile phone. It is also possible that you are wandering in a row of roadside shops and suddenly notice a street painter with a pencil. He is drawing a passing woman, and many people are looking around. Now, you can't help but take out your mobile phone, turn on the camera and take pictures of the painter and his model together. Then you will flip the camera to take a selfie and show your trademark smile.

Why are you doing this? Because you see other people holding mobile phones, taking pictures of artists and yourself, and even taking pictures of other audiences present, including you. You saw several selfie sticks, but didn't notice a person wearing a pair of Google glasses bought for 1500 dollars, silently taking pictures of everyone in front of you. You use your mobile phone to turn what you see into an image, and at the same time you become someone else's image.

This is not over. No one will see a drone taking pictures of this road in the air, including painters, models, spectators and other shops, including this block, and everyone has become an image. Images spread quickly, being seen by others who may be far away in another country, and being forwarded casually. Some people like them, others comment on them.

It can be said that such staggered shooting and staggered watching stories are happening every second today. This is exactly the fact that the book How to See the World that I want to introduce here wants to tell us and analyze for us. The author of this book, Nicholas Mirtsov, is a professor of media culture and communication at new york University and an expert in visual culture. In 2005, he published his masterpiece Watching Babylon to discuss the presentation of the Iraq war in film and television works. How to see the world is his latest work, published on 20 15.

A person painting in the street, a drone hovering in the air, constantly taking pictures, represents two ways to see the world. There are hundreds of years between them, but now they coexist in the same space. Painters focus on things. The painter forgets himself when painting, but you and others are clearly at the scene, but you can't help but take pictures of things, then look at the image on the screen and put yourself in. Why is this happening? When did we become so inattentive and so fond of looking at images?

The first part is about how people have learned to look at themselves bit by bit for four or five hundred years. The second part tells how the rise of cities makes people interested in watching the world; The third part, starting with movies, introduces how images have become ordinary viewing objects for a century. The fourth part puts forward the possibility that vision can change the world.

first part

Mirtsov, the author, tells us that painters concentrate on painting because four or five hundred years ago, people had nothing to see, and they didn't want to see anything.

Think about it, if you can only order one dish at a meal, you will definitely consider the specialty of this restaurant first. By the same token, 400 years ago, an ordinary person's greatest visual wish might be to see a king, queen, or a celebrity he has always wanted to see. At that time, ordinary people just looked at themselves in the mirror at most. Once they saw it, they couldn't keep their portraits, and they couldn't think of any reason why others would pay special attention to themselves.

In this case, the painter has a special position. Western paintings first served princes and nobles. Painters are entrusted by princes, nobles and dignitaries to paint portraits of them and their families. After painting, the work belongs to the client. In this book, the author takes a famous painting "Gong E" as an example. This is the work of velazquez, a Spanish painter in the17th century, which depicts the kings, princesses, ladies-in-waiting, attendants, other nobles and members of the royal family in the court. Finally, the painter himself appeared in the picture. This painting is very convincing. First of all, it is a symbol of the king's power, but it also shows the painter's privilege: he can paint himself in the painting.

Of course, painters also paint self-portraits, which is the earliest "selfie". Now let's look at the paintings left over from that era. If it is a figure painting, you will think that this person is so noble; If it is a painter's self-portrait, we will find that the person in the painting may exude a sacred and solemn atmosphere, and is definitely not an ordinary person. There are some scholars who specialize in self-portraits, from which we can interpret a lot. Regarding the character, his mood, and what disease he got at that time, we will feel that this painting is not only full of artistic charm, but also contains a lot of historical and cultural information. The reason why I think so is that there are too few portraits except the high standard of painting itself. There may be only one portrait in a person's life, and most people don't even have a portrait at all. Therefore, we should make full use of every portrait that has survived to this day.

Apart from painting, there are almost no media that can carry characters. Maybe there will be coins, which are also the heads of the king and queen. Ordinary people will only notice the image of actors wearing strange clothes at festivals or soldiers wearing military uniforms at military parades. There is nothing to see.

By the beginning of the industrial revolution in the18th century, printing had been developed. 1837, photography technology was invented, and then paper media, that is, newspapers and magazines began to be published. New viewing media emerge in an endless stream, and the image of characters suddenly increases, and the carrier carrying characters has also changed from painting to photos. If a person has certain economic conditions, he can get his portrait photos, collect them and post them in his photo album. This is called "democratization" of vision.

The result of democratization is not only a sharp increase in the number of visible figures, but also a person's image is not unique. With photos, there is an angle, and with posing, the same person can take many images. Let's think about leonardo da vinci's famous self-portrait, an old man with bald head, deep eyes and long curly hair. We can't believe that he will look at other things. We even think that he is not young at all; he was born an old man. Then, let's think about the people in the photo. Even if a person takes pictures from different angles and under different light at a certain moment, every face he presents will be different.

Therefore, now we all pursue quantity, and the more the better. When did selfies begin to rise? It is mentioned in the book that Apple iPhone4 was equipped with a front camera with excellent performance since 20 10. The author gives several data: in 20 13 years, in Britain alone, 35 million selfies are posted online every month; By 20 14, Google announced that 93 million selfies were posted online every day, exceeding 30 billion a year. Four hundred years ago, there was not a portrait in a person's life. Now people can take more than 100 selfies when they go to the toilet.

People who take selfies not only want to leave their own image, but also hope that this image is good enough. So you will see that most people pout when taking selfies, suck their cheeks in, and then take pictures at a 45-degree oblique angle. It is said that the face photographed in this way is the most in line with the standard of beauty. Unconsciously, our perception and aesthetics have changed: you think, in the era of taking pictures with cameras, who will think it is important to shoot the awl face?

In this book, the author put a photo: On February 65, 1965, former South African President nelson mandela was buried at 438+03, 65, 438+00. At the funeral, Danish President Schmidt took a selfie with US President Barack Obama sitting on her left and British Prime Minister David Cameron sitting on her right. Their smiles are typical selfie takers, bright and confident. When taking pictures, the most powerful people in the world are completely equal to ordinary people like you and me. We all care about our image and want others to see our best side. The tools we rely on are all machines, but painting is all done by manpower, and photography is also a man-machine cooperation. You need to pay for a painting and a professional photo, which is completely different from the aesthetics of selfie, and the most popular thing-selfie-is the cheapest.

People in the past could not see themselves, not only because of conditions, but also because they regarded themselves as insignificant. And once you can pay attention to your image, you will want to leave some photos. With the development of technology, we are completely fascinated by our appearance, and try to correct and decorate it to satisfy some aesthetic taste of ourselves or others.

the second part

Let's talk about the outside world after watching people.

If you lived four or five hundred years ago, you would feel that there were very few things to see around you. Your contact with people is limited, and your activities are limited. Even if you are a businessman on a business trip, you have to spend all your waking hours making a living, and you don't have much mind to play around and look around. If you are a religious person, then you only see religious places, only visible murals, sacred objects, scriptures and invisible God.

Since when do people pay attention to the outside world? This book tells us that it started with the rise of cities. The rise of cities will be very late. Even a hundred years ago, only two out of every ten people in the world were urban residents. However, Paris, the first real big city in the world, was formed in the19th century. The author lists Paris, London and new york as imperial cities. It was in Paris that the earliest people who specially observed the city appeared, and they found interesting and novel landscapes in the city every day.

As a big city, Paris has created something unprecedented: First, it installed reflective street lamps in18th century, and gas lamps in19th century, which provided sufficient lighting at night; Secondly, Paris has paved a wide and flat road with shops on both sides, which greatly enriches the things to see; Third, Paris has installed arcades, glass roofs provide shelter from the wind and rain, and provide heating in winter, so that people can stay up late or even stay up all night; Also, the shops in Paris are the same as what we are used to now. You can come in and stroll around without buying anything. Therefore, all the shops make big windows to show their goods to people who are wandering around.

Paris has created nightlife, extending the daily time from more than ten hours during the day to 24 hours throughout the day. Men who work hard during the day can wear casual clothes and go shopping at night. With the improvement of urban facilities, real fashion and leisure culture have developed. Newspapers and magazines have begun to discuss the dress of modern girls, and men and women have developed a hobby of taking pets for a walk, which used to be considered as doing nothing. The author tells us that the first Parisians who wandered around and looked around idly were called "prodigal sons" or "prodigal daughters" at that time. They wear decent clothes, mix in the crowd, and sometimes stop in a daze. Few people know their names.

Later, these people had another tool in their hands: a camera. They photographed people in the street without the subject knowing it. New things are mutual. People who have mastered photography technology will soon find that this city is prepared for them, and they can see and shoot more things. The shop that rode downstairs in those days later became today's shopping center; Cafes in those days are now more prosperous in big cities. We need a society with leisure and consumption as its main content. Only in this way can we feed our eyes with infinite scenery.

Every global metropolis is characterized by its fascination with leisure and consumption. If a person is busy with work all day, he will soon feel pushed to the edge of the city. The appearance of the camera did not make the painter lose his job soon. On the contrary, in Paris in the second half of the19th century, impressionist painting gradually rose. Milt Soff, the author, said that the Paris presented in these works is very similar to the Paris photographed by the camera. It is a place where people go for an outing, boating, flirting, watching operas, soaking in cafes, listening to concerts and watching ballet. It seems that the only people who are working are restaurant waiters, actors and sex workers. They all serve people's leisure.

Paris is a model of metropolis, but the landscape of metropolis is not necessarily dominated by leisure and consumption. As long as it is in the city, everything can be a landscape. The author takes Berlin, Jerusalem and South Africa after 1945 as examples. The landscape of these cities is related to isolation. Berlin was divided into two parts during the Cold War. The symbols in the city do not point to leisure and consumption, but to separation, to the enemy and ourselves. There are two worlds on this side of the wall and on the other side. However, people with cameras can turn ugly walls into a landscape. However, this kind of urban photography can also convey key information. For example, photos taken in apartheid cities in South Africa promoted the abolition of this evil system.

At the end of this part, the author wrote about today's global cities, the most typical of which are in China. Due to its late development, China City has formed a unique landscape. The author mentioned Tianducheng, a closed community near Hangzhou, where a 30-square-kilometer building complex was built, replicating the Paris-style buildings, with the Eiffel Tower 107 meters high in the middle. Then I talked about another famous community, Thames Town in Shanghai, where there are cobblestone streets like London and Tudor houses around the market square.

People are familiar with the urban styles of Paris and London, but in these two communities in China, the scenery and life experiences of different cities are superimposed by copying and rearranging, attracting people from other parts of China to take photos and play every day. There were many Western-style historical buildings like Shanghai in the former "Shili Ocean Field", which merged with China architecture and China people's life into a new landscape, which is the best proof of the general trend of globalization.

However, even if the urban landscape is rich enough, our eyes are still not satisfied. Think about it. Today, almost everyone living in the city is "7 × 24", which means that we can use the technology of watching at any time as long as we don't sleep, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Because the visual tools that accompany us constantly transmit various images to our eyes, even if you are under the covers, your eyes are busy. From time to time, I have to take a photo and join the feast of image viewing.

the third part

The book How to See the World tells us how people have gradually moved from a long time when there is nothing to see to an era when there is something to see at any time. It also tells us when we began to like watching videos, or to put it another way, how the screen appeared and entered people's lives. This is about movies.

The first film recognized in the world was 1897 made by Lumiere brothers in France. They filmed the train coming into the station. At that time, there was a legend that this 50-second film scared the audience away as soon as it was broadcast. They have never seen a moving image, and they can't tell whether the train in the image is the same as the train in reality. But it is from the train that people begin to live with the images on the screen. Photographers and film directors were also the first to get inspiration from trains. They imagined the feeling of watching movies, that is, sitting in the train and looking at the moving images outside the window. This inspiration has always led to the action of recording videos with mobile phones today.

In this way, we can understand why we need images: because our eyes should not only look at specific people and things, but also look at stories. First the movie, then the TV. Film is an art and a part of the entertainment industry. It creates a fictional world and makes the audience indulge in it. After TV appeared, the screen took on more tasks. It wants to convey information and tell people what is happening in the world and what has happened.

An example given by the author is that 1963 1 1 June, 2008, American President Kennedy was assassinated. At that time, the scene of assassination was transmitted to the eyes of every TV viewer by TV. From the assassination to the funeral, in four days, 65,438+66 million people in the United States watched TV reports. All regular programs have been cancelled and there are no advertisements. Three radio and television networks all over the United States broadcast news continuously. Television tries its best to produce images: photos and videos of Kennedy's childhood, scenes of his career and scenes of his death, so that viewers can see the legendary life of a president in a short time and remember his glorious image. Kennedy's life is a fact, but it became a story after TV production.

Therefore, images combine reality and fiction. When people are completely used to knowing the world and receiving information by images, no one will refuse to watch TV because the things in the images are fake, just as no one will refuse to take out the delicious and interesting things in TV advertisements because they are illusory. Kennedy's assassination was a visual milestone. According to statistics, during those four days, American families with TV watched TV for an average of eight hours a day. This is an unprecedented TV watching craze, but soon, it is not new. People are more and more accustomed to turning on the TV at any time and watching it when they have time.

Human beings are insatiable, always want more money, always pursue better conditions of food, clothing, housing and transportation, and besides, we want to see more things. This is why movies have always been a huge industry, and why when TV is the most developed, people give all their leisure time after work to such a magical little box, preferring to watch people and cities on TV screens rather than go out to see real people and cities. Neither the real person nor the urban landscape can satisfy us, and we have to look at the images.

And our greed for images has inspired the continuous innovation of image technology. However, the author tells us a little cold knowledge here: the improvement of imaging technology is not mainly because people love watching movies and TV, but because of war. There is a special chapter in the book about the relationship between war and images. When fighting, both commanders want to grasp the whole picture of the battlefield. What should they do? I used to draw maps. Later, during World War I, the technology of carrying cameras by truck appeared, and the technology of aerial photography appeared. Later, during the Cold War, both the United States and the Soviet Union wanted to know each other's developments and sent spy planes to all parts of the world to grasp the situation everywhere. This is the predecessor of today's drones.

1962 During the Cuban Missile Crisis, an American U2 spy plane found the Soviet Union's nuclear missiles in Cuba from the air and took photos. Then, after two weeks of tense confrontation and game, the crisis finally passed, and President Kennedy achieved the greatest achievement during his term of office. But did Kennedy really see the nuclear missile base? No, he only saw the aerial images on the screen.

Then, the first Gulf War 1990, which was the first war broadcast on TV, people all over the world learned about what happened in Iraq and Kuwait through TV. After the September 20065438 10 incident, the author said that the world has entered an era of "image war", and wars and conflicts have shifted to images, and images have been used as weapons. American commandos killed bin Laden. The importance of this matter lies not in bin Laden's own death, but in letting the whole world know and even witness bin Laden's death. In 2003, President George W. Bush launched the second Gulf War because the United States determined that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction according to some photos, although it was later proved that it did not.

In How to Watch the World, a very important point is put forward, that is, our viewing needs promote the development of visual technology and image technology, which in turn will let images control us. As long as you can make an image, you have a chance to deter others. However, the actions taken against terrorist forces will also make our lives not free and make us lack privacy, because the shooting and monitoring of the ground in various countries are strengthening year by year. Where we can't see with the naked eye, images are constantly being produced all the time, and we are being photographed and monitored by others all the time.

part four

There are many books about visual culture. Among similar works, How to See the World is more vivid and full of jumping feeling. After talking about looking at people, the outside world and images, the author Mirsov put forward a prospect: changing the world with vision.

At the beginning of photography, if a person can put pictures of his family on the wall, he will not worship a king as before. The author said that even selfies are rotten streets now, which is a kind of liberation for people who have been in an unfree environment for a long time. The liberation of vision is the starting point of a person's freedom, and everyone has the right to see what he wants to see: we like variety shows, we don't want to turn on TV with only one channel, and we don't want portraits of the same person hanging all over the street.

Some ideas in the book are not new. For example, during the 20 1 1 Occupy Wall Street Movement, the massive photos shared on the Internet spread the effect of the movement to a wider and farther range, forming a global youth linkage. Generally speaking, this event is regarded as a victory of visual technology, and scholars are also discussing from what aspects the new visual technology is expected to improve the effect of the 20 1 1 year exercise when the next similar exercise occurs.

However, the author reminds us that, just as only emperors and generals could get their own portraits in the past, in today's world, there are always 65,438+0% people who can see what other 99% people don't have a chance to see, and there is always the power to try to control others' horizons, because images are also generated by people, and what images are shown to others and what images are not shown to others are manipulated. Therefore, we should always be alert to the images around us and think about where they come from, what kind of information they want to convey and what kind of understanding they lead the audience to. Only in this way can we really get the gift of visual technology and become better people.

abstract

Summarize the book How to See the World. Tracing back to history, the author tells us that every change has revolutionary or liberating significance: those who learn to examine themselves liberate their self-awareness and shake the privilege of being controlled by a few people; People who learn to see the city have broadened their horizons and new pursuits have emerged in their lives; Movies and TV have recreated a virtual and real image world next to the real world, and screens and TV screens have laid the foundation for the emergence of smart phones. Then, what kind of visual revolution will be triggered by internet technology and digital photography technology, which will impact the current visual space? This is also a topic that everyone thinks about.