Page 65 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

48 Johanna Sumiala

order of representation may change the narrative, which again affects the
associations established around the story.
The third dimension of circulation has to do with relationships established
among individuals. There are two paths to follow here: relationships between
spectators and the tortured men pictured in the images and relationships
among individuals, who are looking at the tortured in the images. Common
to both categories of relationships is that they are established in conditions
that are not very much tied to the parameters of time, place, or territory.
Instead, spectators living in diverse locations and cultures are invited to
connect with these images and with one another in “a complex mosaic of
differently sized overlapping and interconnected public spheres” (Keane
1995: 8 in van Dijk 1999: 165).

Circulating gaze

The spectator’s ability to establish a relationship with the tortured is always
tied to the fact of what is put on view; in other words, what is circulated
and disseminated to the public (see also Boltanski 1999: 128). It is also tied
to the ways and practices of looking at the images (Sturken and Cartwright
2005); in this case, especially the ways of looking at the images of torture
(see e.g., Seaton 2005; Chouliaraki 2006). Drawing on David Morgan and
many other scholars of visual culture, I approach the practice of looking by
applying the idea of the gaze (see e.g., Morgan 2005; 2007a; Brennan and
Jay 1996; Bryson 1983). The gaze is understood here as a visual field—a
network in itself —that constitutes a social act of looking (Morgan 2005: 3).
According to Morgan, several elements are included in this field: a viewer, a
fellow viewer, the subject of viewing, the context of the subject viewed, and
the rules that govern the particular relationship between viewers and viewed.
This means that gaze activates certain possibilities of meaning, certain forms
of experiences, and—most important—certain relations among participants
of the visual event. It is the gaze that relates the one seeing and the one to be
seen, conventions and structures of seeing to physical, historical, and ritual
contexts of seeing (Morgan 2005: 3–4; see also Seppänen 2005).
In the case of the AG images, this means that different gazes are constructed
depending on a spectator’s historical, cultural, political, ethnic, religious, and
social background; emotional involvement; condition of looking, whether
he or she is looking at the images in private or in public space, alone, or
with other people, what kind of media he or she is using; the structure and
convention of looking, how he or she approaches the images as a genre of
news, information, entertainment, propaganda, spectacle, harassment. The
type of gaze can vary greatly; there can be an emphatic gaze, a sympathetic