University College London Article Writing Visual Culture Essay

Essay Question:

week 1:
1. Using examples from visual culture (for example, photography and film) explore how or if a face can have meaning?

week2:

2. Explore the meaning of Freud’s notion of the death drive. Does it help explain anything about photographic and/or art practices?

OR

3.. Phillipe Aries states that ‘An acceptable death is a death which can be accepted or tolerated by the survivors.’ (p 89 IN: Western Attitudes toward Death from the Middle Ages to the Present) With reference to photographic examples assess photography’s function in making death ‘acceptable’ (or not) for those that survive.]

week 3:

4, Using what Michel de Certeau calls “tactics” [p 36-37] and what he defines as “strategies” [p35-36] use examples of visual practice to explore a notion of situatedness.

week 4:

5. How might photography or art in general be understood in terms of the Lacanian distinction between the symbolic, the imaginary and the real (please use dictionary definitions of these terms – such as Dylan Evans dictionary of Lacanian psychoanalysis – to explore the question)? In your answer please refer to specific photographic or artistic examples. You may contest or develop these key terms in your answer.

week5:

6. In what ways can translation be used as a method or process to help empathise with what is different or foreign from you? You can explore this from a specific angle, such as you as a viewer, or an image maker/artist, or someone who wants to understand what you see around you.