Status Updates From Ways of Seeing

We can now understand the difficulty of creating
a static image of sexual nakedness. In lived sexual experience nakedness is a process rather than a state. If one moment of that process is isolated, its image will seem banal and its banality, instead of serving as a bridge between two intense imaginative states, will be chilling.

Men survey women before treating them. Consequently how a woman appears to a man can determine how she will be treated.

Every drawing or painting that used perspective proposed to the spectator that he was the unique centre of the world. The camera - and more particularly the movie camera - demonstrated that there was no centre.

the art of any period tends to serve the ideological interests of the ruling class

“One might simplify this by saying: men
act and women appear. Men look at women.
Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of
women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object - and most
particularly an object of vision: a sight.”

chp2+3 feminismo imagen de la mujer

“Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past”
“Now it hangs in a room by itself. The room is like a chapel. The drawing is behind bullet-proof perspex. It has acquired a new kind of impressiveness. Not because of what it shows - not because of the meaning of its image. It has become impressive, mysterious, because of its market value.”

Images were first made to conjure up the appearances of something that was absent.