Staring how we look sobre la mirada.pdf - artecolonial

KNOWLEDGE GATHERING 57
Weegee himself confessed to being “spellbound by the mystery of
murder.” His photos present less the murdered and more the fascination
itself embodied in the spectators he framed with his camera (1996, 13).
In his photos of watching crowds, Weegee often places his camera in the
position of the spectacle—the fire, the dead body, or the wrecked car—in
order to seize frontally the faces of the crowd mesmerized by the spectacle
his picture never reveals. These photos frequently foreground the contorted
faces of children elbowing up to the front for a better view. “Their First Murder,”
for example, shows a gang of children jockeying for position to stare at
something in front of them but behind the camera (see figure 5.1). Their disturbed
and disturbing expressions contrast with the generally more impassive
stares of the adults around them. The caption under another group of eager
children surrounding a weeping woman says, “A woman relative cried . . . but
neighborhood dead-end kids enjoyed the show when a small-time racketeer
was shot and killed” (1945, 86). Revealing children as the most eager starers
seems to confirm that staring is a primal impulse not yet fully tempered
in these children. Admonishments not to stare have thus far not overridden
enthrallment and leashed them up with polite restraint.
We might characterize what psychologists and physicians think of as the
search for dopamine-induced pleasures of visual novelty as instead baroque
stares of wonder. This is an impulse not just to look but also to know what happened,
to get the story, to wonder about a wonder. Staring gratifies our craving
for visual stimulation: it satisfies our hungry brains. Stareable sights such
as our image in the mirror or a dead body offer urgent knowledge gathering
expeditions. Yet staring at one another complicates the thrill of intense looking.
Because we are vulnerable and exposed in interchanges of mutual looking,
social order evolves toward regulating, even ritualizing, visual relationships, as
we have seen. Staring among strangers, the very site of greatest potential for
chancing upon human novelty, has in contemporary American culture come
to be seen as untoward, a violation of the strict rules that govern social interaction.
Baroque staring, then, gets us what we want but it also gets us into trouble
when we direct it toward our fellow citizens. This contradiction makes staring
compelling and fraught human behavior.
THE PERILS OF BAROQUE STARING
The staring encounter can be a tangle of desire and dread for starer and
staree alike. Although we think of staring as an affront to starees, starers
suffer a welter of psychological contradictions as well. Confrontations with
illegible bodies interrupt our reveries on the mundane visual landscape. On