Reflect upon your own art, design or media practice in relation to a least two themes/ideas/theories covered in the Contemporary Visual Culture module and the contemporary creative practice associated with those themes.

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In this essay I am going to discuss my own film work and the work of others in relation to two themes we have covered in the contemporary visual culture module. The themes I have chosen to look at in more detail are reality and visibility and visuality. I am going to approach this task by reading texts associated with these themes including work by Jean Baudrillard and Slavoj Zizek.  I will research what other contemporary work is out there.

I am going to establish the key ideas of each theme and how they relate to practices within film and television. I will look at work by other contemporary practitioners associated with my chosen themes, focusing on reality television and its sub category structured reality. Lastly I will relate the themes to my own work, a documentary I made recently.

Visibility is about what can be seen, while visuality is the way things are seen or shown. Visibility and visuality can also be about power relationships, controlling what others can see, or controlling how much they can be seen.  

Reality is the state of things, as they actually exist. However today reality can be simulated or constructed by the filmmaker or subject, who chooses how they want to represent their reality.

Both themes can be about being seen and how you are shown, but visibility shows as much as possible, while reality can show what you think is real, however it may not be as real as it seems.

In England and France in the 1700’s there were sumptuary laws, which assigned each group of society its own dress code. People were clearly distinguishable from other ranks of society. You tell someone’s status by simply looking at him or her. “Theoretically, you could go to jail for imitating another person’s bodily appearance” (Sennett, 1988) In reality people need not have worried about being arrested as they would have found it very difficult to tell whether a stranger was dressing accurately. “The purpose of the clothes was not to be sure of whom you were dealing with, but to be able to behave as if you were sure” (Sennett, 1988) When you saw someone, you assigned them a position in society and addressed them as such, even though you could not be sure that the person wearing the clothes was showing you what they really were, or what they wanted you to see them as.

Visibility gives power. It can control how much can be seen or shown. Visibility can be about controlling how you are seen and how others perceive you. Roland Barthes wrote “...once I feel myself observed by the lens, everything changes: I constitute myself in the process of posing I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in advance into an image.” (Camera Lucida, 1980) When you are aware that you are being watched, so you pose and put on a front to appear to be what you want to be seen as, not what you really are. By doing this you are trying to change the way people see you, to control how they see you and appear different from what you really are.  The image becomes more real than the actual person – the appearance becomes the reality.    

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A contemporary example of visibility is the TV series ‘The Secret Millionaire’ (2006 – present) in which millionaires go under cover into impoverished communities and agree to give away their own money (Appendix 1,2).  Members of the  are told the cameras are present to film a documentary. The millionaire lives like the people in area and they must survive on a budget.

They dress differently so as not to reveal their wealth. They hide their true identities from the people they meet, but as viewers we know he or she is pretending, they change their appearance in order ...

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