In Review: Tribute

What does it mean to believe our own eyes?

That’s a question A. Joan Saab explores in Objects of Vision: Making Sense of What We See (2020), part of the Pennsylvania State University Press’s Perspectives on Sensory History series.

Saab, the Susan B. Anthony Professor in the Department of Art and Art History and the vice provost of academic affairs, sees the matter as one of context.

“Objects of vision,” she writes, “are not seen objectively or simply for what they are but are situated within the context of relationships, ideas, and cultures that shape what we see when we view these objects.”

Since antiquity in Western thought, sight has been understood as the primary and foundational sense for understanding the world. Embedded in that idea is an assumption that has remained relatively intact since: that the visual world can be recorded and described in objective terms.

Non-Westerners who have found themselves the unwitting subjects of Eurocentric narratives have done much to discredit that assumption. But the notion of objective vision has also marginalized many in the West whose views fall outside the dominant frameworks.

Thus Saab describes her project as “an intervention” that focuses on “objects of vision often excluded from master narratives—material artifacts and ways of seeing that are too easily dismissed as unimportant, strange, frightening, and even silly.” Often, she notes, the objects are ones that defy easy categorization.

The result is a peripatetic narrative that carries readers from the Renaissance to the 1835 New York Sun articles claiming life on the moon; from Cooperstown, New York’s famous Cardiff Giant to the supposed capturing of ghostly images in early photography. In each case, Saab shows how basic emotions such as desire, pleasure, and fear have operated in shaping how we see things—and why we believe we’re seeing what we think we see.

Saab frames the book, however, with a prologue dedicated to a more recent example: the infamous video of the 1991 beating of the African American construction worker Rodney King by members of the Los Angeles Police Department.

The incident was captured by a man, George Holliday, who lived in a nearby apartment. It provoked a national outcry and ultimately led to the officers’ arrest for excessive use of force.

But a largely white jury concluded—based on that same video—that there was insufficient evidence to convict. Defense attorneys broke the tape into its component frames, Saab writes.

“By showing the beating in slow motion, they treated each of the fifty-six blows separately. According to one of the jurors, ‘A lot of those blows, when you watch them in slow motion, were not connecting. . . . not that much damage was done.’ ”

Blowing up images and rendering the tape as a series of still images changed what the members of the jury believed they saw. The defense argued the video was evidence of the dangerous nature of police work and cast each still frame as a discrete example of that danger. When a prosecutor asked one of the officers, “You can’t look at the video and say that every one of those blows is reasonable, can you?” the officer replied, “Oh, I can if I put my perceptions in.”

“The uses of Holliday’s videotape at the officers’ criminal trial not only demonstrated the ways in which technologies of vision can shape our understandings of what and how we see what is before our eyes, it showed how the same visual evidence can be manipulated to tell very different stories,” Saab writes. “By blowing up and freezing the frames, the actions of the four officers on trial, as well as King’s own movements, were—at least in the eyes of the jurors—disconnected from the rest of the tape as well as from the fraught history of race relations in the United States.”

While we continue to expand our capacity to record ever more technically advanced objects of vision, the central problem—“making sense of what we see”—remains.

Kathleen McGarvey was an associate editor and writer for Rochester Review from 2006 until her death this past spring. More about her career and her contributions to the magazine and the University. —Scott Hauser