Review: Frances Guerin (ed.), On Not Looking: The Paradox of Contemporary Visual Culture

Abstract

Frances Guerin’s book is a finely curated labour of love. For a book on visual culture, this is saying something since there are already so many books about this field. However, what distinguishes her book from the others is the fact that she is dealing with ‘not looking’ rather than ‘looking’. The book consists of 11 essays that are divided into 4 pertinent sections, covering diverse topics such as painting, a piece of film which was part of an investigation into homoeroticism in Ohio in the 1960s, sculpture and photography. Drawing on her own scholarship about images and the Holocaust, Guerin presents the motivation for this collection of essays by stating that ‘in light of the immense power given to images by destroying them, together with the weaving of images into political governance and everyday life, we need to find new ways of approaching images and icons’, new ways of ‘recasting notions of contemporary iconoclasm as well as expanding its conception, with the goal of further understanding its ramifications’ (pp. 2–3).