Seeing Whole

Seeing Whole: Toward an Ethics and Ecology of Sight explores the ways in which seeing as an embodied process is always a multivalent, ambiguous, and holistic undertaking. Looking at an image entails the mobilization of a range of affordances that together produce sight and insight as a phenomenological experience, namely cultural predispositions, geographical situatedness, medium specificity, personal biography, socio-political relationality, and corporeal affectibility. In their own diverse ways, the essays in this book suggest that acts of seeing make up a visual ecology that, in turn, introduces a new ethical horizon distinct from, but in continuous interaction with, conventional ethics. Spanning a great variety of media forms-from painting and photography to film, video, literature, fashion, graffiti, and installation art-this interdisciplinary collection offers a thorough reconceptualization of the relation between the aesthetics and the ethics of images and represents an innovative addition to the field of visual culture studies.