The Gaze Multiple

The project ‘Towards a Gaze Multiple’ is currently conducted by artists and PhD candidates Elodie Hiryczuk and Sjoerd van Oevelen at LUCAS Centre for the Arts in Society at Leiden University. 

This project interrogates how a corpus of critical photography artworks offer alternative ways of seeing and understanding the natural environment. The goal of this research is to critically probe the concept of the gaze as created by a dominant western worldview and offer an alternative and more complex approach to what seeing can mean for our relation with the environment. 

This project furthers a theoretical debate in which the gaze was initially referring to a unifying way of looking at and conceiving ‘the’ world and in which ‘nature’ was contained by a western approach of mastering and capturing. Because ‘Nature photography’ can be conceived as an important manifestation of the construction of the gaze – often creating a distant view – this research concentrates in particular on how such photography can problematise a unifying and universal conception of the environment. 

Tapping into recent theoretical and methodological developments in which multiplicities of ways of being, doing and understanding are stressed this project introduces the concept of the Gaze Multiple to conceive the act of looking as multi-directional and messy. It considers how contemporary photographic art practices that foreground this multiplication (for example by using different perspectives or image-manipulation) can provide ways to develop a new vocabulary to understand the gaze as multiple. The project explores the Gaze Multiple through translations between doing and thinking by combining academic and artistic interventions.