Psychoanalysis and the Photographer - University of Westminster

I attended a seminar on Saturday and one of the speakers was Darian Leader, a psychoanalyst. I was intrigued by what he had to say regarding the way we look at, and are looked at by others. He spoke about scopic drive and scopic desire, explaining that when we look or are looked at there is:

scopic desire, that can be thought of as like a quest - such as the search for the Holy Grail. In other words, the desire to find something in what we see.

scopic drive on the other hand, can be seen as the drive to lose something - think the Lord of the Rings; a journey to get rid of something.

So when we look we either want to find or lose something. It occurred to me that this thought process is independent from what we look at. For example an image of a teddy bear could incite in the viewer feelings of nostalgia, longing, or fear - depending on the viewers own memories and experiences. I guess this is where the idea of scopic drive and scopic desire comes into play.

Leader also spoke about emotions being sometimes too much to bear and that they can create bodily tension. I am intrigued by this notion and as a photographer I realised that the physicality of this concept is a good way to visually express an emotion or metaphor in an image.

He also made a very interesting observation about the gaze of the other. He pointed out that when we are looked at we have no defence from the gaze of another. That look could be friendly, puzzled, disgusted, hostile - how do we interpret and internalise that look? Does it form part of our own self image?

He spoke about 'presence and absence' and how looking and not looking creates a structure. How the subject follows or does not follow the gaze of the other and that we are always looking in relation to what someone else is looking at.

He mentions how we defend ourselves from the look. How we use masks, screens, etc, to distract the look of the other away from ourselves. In the animal world this defence works when a lizard loses its tail, a bird loses feathers, and in the human world masks attract the evil eye and artists create work to keep away the gaze of the other.

I found the talks quite inspiring and a lot to take in. I need more time to think and assimilate and I can certainly see myself incorporating aspects of the interpretation of the look into my own work.