Shared Histories of Sight

We approach design as a set of knowledges concerned with shaping the frames through which the world is seen and enacted.

What might it look like if a graphic designer and visual anthropologist had a conversation to delaminate the enduring histories of colonization that shape the very conditions in which images are made and seen?

This review presents four articles published in Visual Anthropology Review and Visible Language, each of which contribute different concerns, themes, and kinds of archives for thinking through these questions. The presentation of the articles follows a few logics. First, they are ordered chronologically, beginning in 1991 and ending in 2019. Second, they survey different visual media, moving through discussions of magazine photography, ethnographic and Indigenous film, ornamentation on 16th century Mesoamerican architecture, and 19th century Indigenous typography. Third, they are arranged so as to trace a conceptual progression, by shoring up ways of thinking about the connections between ways of seeing and ways of framing the gaze, and then putting these ideas into play by looking at visual artifacts made by Indigenous persons for both colonizing and decolonizing projects.

The following sections render only a few threads from each piece. They are by no means exhaustive readings. Instead, they mark a moment in the authors’ processes of learning to describe shared histories of sight, which are themselves unevenly visible. Whereas both articles from Visual Anthropology Review offer ways of thinking about looking relations that characterize image-making projects in colonized contexts, the articles from Visible Language discuss how objects of design themselves transmit Indigenous perspectives. Reading through these four articles, a reader might find ways to consider how the gaze is a condition and effect of design, just as design is a condition and effect of the gaze. In other words, design is a part of making the world imaginable, and that vision of the world informs design. Therefore, discussing design is more interesting when one considers an anthropological look at the gazes that make it possible. Furthermore, can we imagine a world where multiple gazes exist (Escobar 2018) and intersect without unequal relations, undoing the existing imbalances of power, pleasure, and knowledge? What prevents this future? Might it be a genealogical "illiteracy," merging Lutz and Collins‘s term visual "illiteracy" with Witehira's notion of identity, which synthesized means the lack of resources to understand the looping process that shapes social relations? Both framing and seeing under the colonial project require genealogical "illiteracy" to endure, a forgetfulness of where one comes from and apathy of "the other." Or, there is Ginsburg's possibility of designing ways of seeing—built-in affordances—where designers develop the discourses and practices that shape the frames through which people see the world, enabling participation in making a shared world.

Lutz, Catherine, and Jane Collins. 1991. “The Photograph as an Intersection of Gazes: The Example of National Geographic.” Visual Anthropology Review 7 (1): 134–49. https://doi.org/10.1525/var.1991.7.1.134. 

Catherine Lutz and Jane Collins (1991) insist that even when we are “invited to forget” the “looking relations” that make documentary photographs possible (146), these artifacts remain “complex and multi-dimensional” (134). To read rather than merely receive a photograph, they argue, is to reveal its social context: to attend to the viewpoints (and values) that converge along the processes of taking, circulating, and encountering a documentary image.

To think through this process of delamination, Lutz and Collins engage with a collection of 600 photographs published by National Geographic between 1950 and 1986, noting that during this period, the magazine’s staff was “overwhelmingly white and male” (135). The subjects of these photographs, they also note, are represented as objects “of beautiful attraction or documentary interest” (134). To find a way out, Lutz and Collins investigate this lens of “non-Western” otherness and the colonial social relations that enable its radically unequal configuration of “intimacy, pleasure, scrutiny, confrontation and power” (136).

The article approaches the “lack of reciprocity” (142) that characterizes the visual economy of the collection’s photographs by describing “the looks that are exchanged” (147) within and beyond the frame of the photograph. Lutz and Collins present these different kinds of gazes as a typology. However, rather than imposing an exhaustive analytic framework, this typology is a pedagogical gesture offering resources for constructing questions to delaminate a photograph’s context, which becomes compacted at the moment of reception.

Who took the photograph? What tropes, elements and principles organize the composition and its placement on the page? How do these editorial decisions reveal the anticipation of a particular audience? How is it received by different viewers? How are the gazes of the people in the image oriented? How do mirrors or cameras, if these are present, modify the gaze of the photo’s subjects? And how do these refractions steer or foreclose possibilities for self-examination on a viewer’s part? WIth these questions, we might think of design beyond the composition of individual images, or the arrangement of groups of images into a spread. Lutz and Collins show how  gazes intersect through both of these processes and are also arranged such that some perspectives and modes of reception come to carry more weight than others. That is, looking relations themselves can be seen through the lens of design.

Importantly, the work of uncovering these freighted dynamics is not presented as an end unto itself, but rather as a moment in a larger process of inciting new ways of seeing and being seeing, where pleasure “is not predicated on the desire to control, denigrate, or distance oneself from the other” (135). Acknowledging the ambivalences of visuality in colonial social contexts is a necessary step in the pursuit of “an alternative gaze... [that] is less dominating, more reciprocal” and even transformative (146). Without a complementary attempt at learning to see otherwise, analytic exercises risk becoming merely ascetic. This approach suggests an alternative theory of knowledge and power, where pleasure can be found in acts of seeing that do not seek to fix others in place or to pacify the anxieties that come with knowing one’s gaze to be irreducibly limited (136). Rather than avoid this vulnerability to disappointment and surprise, Lutz and Collins seem to locate another kind of pleasure in the possibility of confronting a dominating will to know with a mutually enlivening wish to learn.

Thinking of the photograph as an intersection of gazes with the insight that self-knowledge and knowledge of the world are as mutually imbricated as they are partial, a reader might ask: On what terms might it be possible to think about a confrontation between different ways of seeing that can give rise to mutually enlivening pleasures? How might a reader of still or moving images exercise their capacity to thoughtfully imagine and enact these possibilities?

Ginsburg, Faye. 1995. “The Parallax Effect: The Impact of Aboriginal Media on Ethnographic Film.” Visual Anthropology Review 11 (2): 64–76. https://doi.org/10.1525/var.1995.11.2.64. 

Faye Ginsburg (1995) theorizes  the encounter between perspectives situated across different genres rather than in a single institutional collection, here ethnographic film and Indigenous media concerned with forms of self- and world-making knowledge often glossed as “culture” (73). Like Lutz and Collins, Ginsburg acknowledges that practical and epistemic histories of colonial occupation challenge contemporary projects that seek to represent social relations, as they can no longer take their lines of sight for granted. Ginsburg describes the need for a frame that can place ethnographic film and Indigenous media production in conversation around shared objects of analysis, such as situated “processes of identity construction” (73) and “the cinematic representation of culture” (65). 

Gisburg unpacks this idea by extending the concept of a parallax effect, which she borrows from the fields of astrophysics and optics, where it describes how two angled views of the same object can reveal properties that a single view cannot. Binocular vision is a common example of this phenomenon, where the distance between two eyes or lenses makes it possible to appreciate volume and distance (65). By comparison, an analytic frame that can encompass the lenses of Indigenous media production and ethnographic film would allow for a bifocal investigation of the conditions in which the various efforts that give a shared life form can be understood as “culture.”

This approach builds on Jean Rouch’s concept of shared anthropology (1975). For Rouch, the possibilities of shared anthropology entailed cultivating increasingly collaborative ways of producing and circulating films, such as the screening practice he called regards comparés. Rouch experimented with showing ethnographic films in the company of people who were part of their making, thus providing an occasion for the juxtaposition of their comments to delaminate the different viewpoints drawn into the film’s images.

While Ginsburg is inspired by Rouch’s methodological experiments, she also gestures in new directions. Rather than suggest a language for describing viewpoints that intersect in a single film, she proposes scaffolding to sustain engagement between two separate genres (66). In parallel, while Rouch uses the concept of regards comparés to render and theorize the gaze, Ginsburg uses the parallax effect to turn a shared gaze toward a third object: the representation, mediation and understanding of “culture” (65).

In this endeavour, Ginsburg’s critique also resembles Lutz and Collins as the encounter between gazes raises explicit concerns with pleasure and an implicit concern with power. Here, Ginsburg seeks to outline two different ways of relating power, knowledge and pleasure. On the one hand, she identifies the pleasure of viewing documentary images that do not prompt the viewer to examine their relation to a social context. Ginsburg also describes the pleasure of representations that move audiences to elaborate and enhance their cultural practices (70), meaning to examine and thoughtfully alter their ways of seeing and participating in the making of a shared world. For Indigenous audiences, Ginsburg suggests, the pleasures of self-representation could be as profound as the experience of imagining and enacting community-based futures through the pressures of colonial erasures (72). In parallel, Ginsburg also suggests that the pleasures of responsive engagement can extend to the project of constructing bifocal descriptions for understanding the conditions in which “culture” comes to name the various efforts that give a shared life form. Thus, her interest in a shared analytic framework for Indigenous media production and ethnographic film can be taken as a wager that hinges on a picture of learning as a process capable of transforming both people and their social worlds (71). The work of surfacing a picture of the world at the intersection of overlapping experiences of colonization can connect pleasure and responsibility by cultivating a form of visual literacy, which thinks with gazes and genres to understand how people and social worlds move in time.

References Cited

Escobar, Arturo. 2018. Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 

Tsing, Anna Lowenhaput. 2011. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Julier, Guy, Mads Nygaard Folkmann, Niels Peter Skou, Hans-Christen Jensen, and Anders V. Munch, Editors. 2019. Design Culture: Objects and Approaches. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. 

Wizinsky, Matthew. 2022. Design After Capitalism: Transforming Design Today for an Equitable Tomorrow. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Image Credits

From Witehira 2019, 103. The caption reads: “Photograph of Pikau Teimana of Putaruru with words ‘Aohau Taute’ tattooed onto left arm. Photographer unknown, Ref: PAColl-3861-44-01. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.” 

From Ginsburg 1995, 71. The caption reads: “From Manyu-Wana. Teaching children the Warlpiri word for the number three.”

Wright-Carr, David Charles. 2017. “Signs of Resistance: Iconography and Semasiography in Otomi Architectural Decoration and Manuscripts of the Early Colonial Period” Visible Language 51 (1): 58–87. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/visiblelanguage/pdf/V51N1_2017_E.pdf

David C. Wright-Carr (2017) analyzes images produced by Indigenous artisans that were incorporated into 16th century buildings used by Catholic monastic orders. He notes Otomi image-making communicated elements of the Christian gospel through a visible language tradition whose signs were connected to Indigenous myths and worldviews that preceded the colonial encounter (61). He argues that this mutual framing of Otomi and Christian perspectives can be seen as a form of “cultural resistance” (80) insofar as it served as a “vehicle for the reaffirmation of ethnic identity and political legitimacy in public space” (61). 

To unpack these layered designs, Wright-Carr describes aspects of pre-Columbian “central Mexican visual language” (59), a geographic region that in his research encompasses “much of Mesoamerica, excluding most of Western Mexico and the Maya area” (61). The nations occupying this region in the 16th century relied on a common system of visual communication, despite speaking different languages. The signs comprising this system communicated ideas that were intelligible across Otomi, Nahua, Mixtec, Zapotec, and Tlepanec linguistic communities (60). In this context, a clear distinction between “the activities we call ‘writing’ and ‘painting’” cannot be taken for granted (65). 

For instance, using a toponymic carving on one of the walls of the Convent of Saint Peter of Jilotepec (1530-1540)  and from the Huichapan Codex (1632), Wright-Carr describes some of the conventions of toponymic signs used for representing the pre-Hispanic kingdom (67). Roughly, the images representing Jilotepec show a parabola decorated with a pattern of rhomboids forming a net pattern containing circles or dots, which represents a stylized mountain. A pair of volutes exist on the sides, and two ears of corn sit on top of the curving shape. The mountain itself rests on five to six symmetrically arranged lines that represent rivulets of water. Many of the images’ components held similar associations for communities across pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica. For example, Wright-Carr notes that in codices from Central Mexico the net pattern found on the Jilotepec toponym is often used to represent the body of the Earth monster, expressing the idea of the reptilian skin of the Earth. Similarly, the pattern is also used to represent the snakes that make up the skirt of Cōātl Īcue, the Aztec goddess of warfare and childbirth, joining both fertility and death in a single figure.

Wright-Carr claims that Otomi used “imagery rooted in the traditions of their ancestors as a means for cultural, religious, and political resistance” (80). The mutual framing echoes Ginsburg’s proposition of a shared analytic framework (for thinking about how visual representations of culture across different scales make common objects and conditions appear). One might be tempted to see the architecture itself as providing a shared frame for the articulation of Indigenous and Catholic worldviews, and so, for the construction of two colonial identities. However, it is important to remember that the overt aim of these images is the conversion of Indigenous peoples. While Indigenous sculptors and painters “express vital aspects of their traditional worldview” (80) through their work and within plain sight of Friars and settlers, these gazes neither confront each other, nor do they turn to a joint exploration of their conditions of possibility. They are a far cry from Rouch’s regards comparés, and much closer to the muted gazes described by Lutz and Collins. 

Thinking once more with Ginsburg, Wright-Carr shows how the work of Otomi artisans articulates Indigenous perspectives, but not how it might have enhanced the making of Otomi social worlds after the Spanish Conquest. These observations do not contest the claim that Otomi artisansanship exemplified a form of resistance, nor diminish the importance of Wright-Carr’s research. Rather, they simply show that a connection between the forms of image-making understood as signs of resistance and a fuller picture of what resistance might have entailed (culturally, religiously, politically, and so on) remains unexplored.

Witehira, Johnson. 2019. “Mana Mātātuhi: A Survey of Maori Engagement with the Written and Printed Word during the 19th Century.” Visible Language 53 (1): 76–109. https://doi.org/10.34314/vl.v53i1.4624. / https://journals.uc.edu/index.php/vl/article/view/4624

In considering the relationship between the gaze and design, Johnson Witehira (2019) moves us beyond Wright-Carr's resistance to engagement. Witehira's engagement describes what happens through the exchanges and contradictions of encounter (cf.Tsing 2005), attending to how back and forth exertions of power produce the ground on which new and often ambivalent forms gain traction. Those forms include a collection of hoahoa whakairoiro Māori (Māori graphic design), frequently involving lettering and typography on Māori newspapers, currency, posters, carved figures, building facades, and bodies. These visual expressions combine to create an "associational" (Wizinsky 2022) visual identity of Māori communal life-making after the colonial encounter. The collection, as a whole, is loaded with variability because of the many different Māori sub-groups, contrasting monolithic commercial brand identity systems so often seen today. Still, they combine to represent a fluid and open (106) whakapapa (identity/genealogy).

While Wright-Carr's article makes it possible for us to imagine the pleasure Otomi artisans might have felt when articulating Christian mythology in visible language that was charged with Indigenousworldviews, in the collection of artifacts he examines, the framing of these images was over-determined by Catholic missionaries’ evangelical project. Witeheria shows us a kind of inversion, wherein Māori people appropriate colonial technologies, like money, to articulate their traditions and political projects outside the frame of the colonizers. 

Like the previous articles, Witehira also interrogates the intersection of “two vastly different worlds.” (104). While the British were apathetic to Māori knowledge and technology, the Māori were “keen” to learn Pākehā (British) tools. Witehira examines Māori ways of arranging Latin letterforms to communicate the sounds and meanings of Māori language and express Māori traditions and political projects in a context changed by colonial encounter. This new technology of “written communication, introduced by Europeans, provided Māori with a new way to future-proof, disseminate, and store knowledge and histories” (105). More than the simple rearrangement of letterforms, Māori typography transformed type in response to a long history of visual art practice. At this intersection of knowledges, “the kaihoahoa Māori (Māori designer) has created something altogether new, a synthesis of the Didone rational serif with elements from an inscriptional style of lettering” (98). In this sense, we can understand the kaihoahoa Māori as being part of a design culture, or a cluster of relationships joining “the domains of design practice, production and everyday life” (Julier et al. 2019), a design culture that is both separate and linked to European histories of design. Witehira describes the intersection of European and Māori design cultures through the use of Māori language to critically intervene in design theory: “by introducing kupu Māori (Māori words) relating to Māori written communication, the discussion and analysis of Māori letterforms and writing moves beyond the inability of Western terminology to delineate Māori visual culture (Jahnke 2006) and offers a model for situating discussions of both historical and contemporary Māori visual communication design within Māori language” (78).

Witehira underscores the enduring risk involved in adopting the Latin alphabet to translate Māori language (80). What might be lost or papered over with the new forms of communication? In the 19th century, most of the available material for learning to write was Christian texts, meaning that while learning to use new Pākehā tools, Māori students would also assimilate European religious traditions.This, however, is not a foregone conclusion. Witehira is quick to point out that Māori engagements with written communication, as with settlers, were far from passive (105). 

Thus, Witehira describes a situation in which acquiring the power that came with visual communication, required braving the risk of assimilation. The power of writing and typography enabled new ways of transmitting traditions, or trans-generational forms of knowledge and practice whose changing iterations become necessary for the making of social worlds, as well as disseminating knowledge to a wider audience. Witehira notes that this reinvention of convention was needed because the influence of Christianity dispersed Māori communities into different groups (95). In this context, typography and writing played an essential role in the construction of Māori identities (96) by adapting "imported technologies and forms," like the letterpress, "to meet Māori visual communication needs” (89). For example, the first niupepa Māori (Māori newspaper) served to communicate between the Māori to the Pakeha (settlers), organize the Māori community, and foster Māori culture (84). This followed the first Māori language newspaper, which settlers ran for colonizing purposes. The new paper was entirely Māori owned and produced, initiated by the Kīngitanga (Māori King), who "sought to unify the Māori by developing a system similar to the British Monarchy” (84-85). The autonomy demonstrated by the new sovereignty through the Māori newspaper raised the alarm for the British Crown, who now "saw the Kīngitanga as a serious threat to the Colonial Government and its aspirations for land acquisition” (85). The Kīngitanga, though critical of Colonial Government, "did not see itself in direct opposition" (85). One observes this belief surface through Kīngitanga bank notes stating "that the note is valid for all people,"including the Pakeha (87-88).

Witehira’s study of Māori visual communication shows how the work of Māori designers played a key role in the construction of Māori community through the pressures of Evangelization, and in sustaining visions of autonomous futures.