The Myth of the Innocent Eye and the Power of the Representation of the Gaze in Culture

Abstract

Ever since the visual culture started to develop as an independent field of scholarly interest in the 1980s, this process has been marked by an ever-increasing expansion of the field of the visual and has come to be an interdisciplinary study where the visual is combined with the anthropological model of scientific research, based in the theory of the visual. This methodological approach resulted in a new paradigm of the image as a pre-requisite for a broader remit of the visual studies: the image as something separate from the medium itself and open to exploratory questions such as where, how and when an is image created, when and how it is broadcast, emitted and transferred, when and how the image is received, perceived and how it operates. This more or less coherent set of precepts which characterize the theory of the visual forms a foundation for the consideration of several important puncti – at least three – which shift the focus of the discussion from the objects that are observed to the actual act of observation. These include the myth of the innocent eye, the status and power of representation in the construction of the gaze, and the transformation.