Ok so I left off about a month ago with grand expectations of posting here regularly…never happened. But now that I’m back I figure I should go back to where I left off…thoughts on The Object Stares Back by James Elkin.
I found this book to be a good starting place for a course on Visual Communication as it definitely exposed me to some ideas on seeing and vision that I had never previously considered. For instance Elkins says:
“Vision, I have argued, is not the simple thing it is imagined to be. It has to do with desire and possessiveness more than mechanical navigation, and it entangles us in a skein of changing relations with objects and people. In particular, vision helps us to know what we are like: we watch versions of ourselves in people and objects, and by attending to them we adjust our sense of what we are. Because we cannot see what we do not understand or use or identify with, we see very little of the world — only the small pieces that are useful and harmless. Each act of vision mingles seeing with not seeing, so that vision can become less a way of gathering information than avoiding it. “(p. 201)
The implications of this quote are tremendous for those involved in any aspect of communicating visually i.e. artists, graphic designers, those in the marketing and advertising industries. In order to have a full command over one’s audience an understanding of the complex nature of vision is imperative I believe. People don’t see what they don’t understand is a line which translates well to marketing communication. It explains why advertisers use those images most common to a majority of people to sell their product, it makes it easy for our minds to process and subsequently take in the message being touted. Knowing this can potentially demystify the process of creating graphic displays which stand out in our already image saturated world. Thoughts?
