Images, Power and Politics

I found the first chapter, Images, Power and Politics, to be very interesting. It brought up valid points that have never crossed my mind before. The process of looking is so complex that to fully understand takes the analysis of many theories and study of many images.
The chapter addresses many things that intrigued me. First off I really enjoyed the sentence it starts off with. “To those of us who are blind or have low vision, seeing and visuality are no less important than they are to those of us who are sighted, because the everyday world is so strongly organized around spatial cues that take seeing for granted.” I feel that this sentence is really strong in describing how present day culture treats looking. We take the ability of sight for granted and are oblivious to the spatial cues that we see everyday. Sight is a gift and we should learn how to fine-tune it.
I really like how the book uses a variety of art pieces to be examples for the text and then continues to reference the different pictures throughout the chapter. For example, the picture of The First Murder really stuck out to me. It is a picture of a group of people huddling around a body right after a murder was committed. The picture depicts a variety of emotions such as smiling, crying and curiousness, all adding to the intensity of the picture. It is an interesting picture because as the viewer “we look with equal fascination on the scene, catching the children in the act of looking, their eyes wide with shock and wonder.” This picture is raw and real, a perfect example of a looking picture.