What the gaze of others does to our images

When I invite a group of people to each take a photograph and then look at them together, with the rule that the author cannot speak while the others say what they see, things happen that I have not finished understanding after several years of practice. Something is woven in the collective gaze that touches on symbolization, on the relationship between consciousness and the unconscious in creation, on the construction of identity, on the circulation of affects within the group. This article is not a how-to guide for the workshop, which I have described in detail elsewhere. It is an attempt to think through what is at play in this exercise, and to draw out concepts that hold for mediation in the broader sense, whether therapeutic, cultural, educational, or social.

We no longer see our own image the same way afterward

Here is something I heard after a workshop: “It feels as though you are hearing things about yourself, but they are not really about yourself. There is something where you feel you are searching for something.” The gaze of others on our image searches us. It rummages within us for something we did not know we had placed there, and it calls us out.

Another person said: “I was waiting for someone to find the message I had imagined.” She had placed a conscious message in her image, and she watched for its reception. The others found different messages, which were not hers, or which were hers without her knowing it. This surprise, this discovery of what we carry without knowing it, is the heart of the experience.

We no longer see our own image the same way after the collective gaze. This means we are not the sovereign authors of what we create, and that this slippage is what gives creation its transformative reach.

Reversing the order of time

In most creative workshops, a great deal of time goes into making, and very little into looking at what has been made. We make a film, take photographs, edit, assemble, and at the end we show the result quickly, before parting ways. The time of production prevails over the time of reception.

I propose the reverse. Fifteen minutes to take a photograph. An hour, sometimes more, to look at them together. This inversion rests on a conviction: what transforms people lies as much in the act of receiving the gaze of others on what they have made as in the act of bringing one’s own gaze to what others have made.

In Art as Experience (1934), John Dewey showed that aesthetic experience does not reside in the object but in the encounter between the object and the one who receives it. Art is not in the canvas; it is in what happens when someone looks at the canvas. If we take this proposition seriously, then the time of looking is as important as the time of making. Hans-Georg Gadamer, in Truth and Method (1960), extends this intuition by showing that all understanding is a dialogue between what the object carries and what the subject brings to it. Interpretation is not a distortion of an original meaning; it is the very place where meaning is constructed. When a group looks at an image and each person says what they see in it, every reading is a singular encounter between this image and that person, and this encounter produces a meaning that did not exist before.

The author does not speak

The rule is simple: when your photograph is being looked at, you are not allowed to speak. The others speak. You listen.

If the author speaks, they reduce the image to their conscious intention. They say: this is what I meant. And the others, out of politeness, deference, school habit, or the cognitive bias produced by the speech of authority, stop seeing anything else. The image closes around a single meaning. This is what happens in literature classes when we are asked “what did the author mean?” To my mind, this is the most sterile question one can ask before a work, because it presupposes that meaning lies in the author’s intention and nowhere else. Meaning is in the encounter, in what each person receives, and what each person receives is singular.

In The Open Work (1962), Umberto Eco theorized this multiplicity of meaning. Every work is a field of interpretive possibilities, an open proposition that each viewer completes in their own way. The silence imposed on the author, in this protocol, gives this theory a body. It creates the conditions for the polysemy of the image to unfold, without being closed down by the function of authority of the one who made it.

Speaking about another person’s image, or what the detour allows

Something perhaps just as important, and less visible, happens when it is another person’s image that is in front of us and we take the floor to say what we see in it.

In ordinary social life, our emotions and sensations are material from which we are largely cut off. Emotions and sensations arise within us spontaneously, without our control, and they can place us in difficulty in the social space. As we grow up, we learn not to let them express themselves too freely. We fear they may harm us, expose us, say things about us we would rather keep to ourselves. A psychic economy takes shape, consisting of constantly filtering what can be said from what must remain inside.

The exercise of the collective gaze nevertheless asks for exactly this: to seek within oneself what another’s image brings forth, and to put it into words aloud. What makes this demand bearable is that it apparently addresses itself to the image rather than to oneself. We speak about the other’s image. We say what it evokes, what it does, what we see in it. The detour through this external object permits an emotional expression which, if approached frontally (“what are you feeling right now?”), would probably be blocked. The image becomes a buffer zone in which one can deposit affects without having to openly recognize oneself as their source.

This setting echoes what Donald Winnicott, in Playing and Reality (1971), called transitional space: a space that is neither fully inside nor fully outside, where subject and object meet and transform one another, and where psychic contents can be worked through at a protected distance. Bruno Bettelheim, in The Uses of Enchantment (1976), had shown the same protective function with regard to the fairy tale: it is because the wolf eats the grandmother in a story that is not the child’s own that the child can elaborate, in good time, their own fears. The detour through someone else’s fiction makes thinkable what would otherwise remain out of reach.

Another person’s image functions here as an analogous third object. In commenting on it, we are not only speaking of it. We discover what it awakens within us, and we allow ourselves to say it because we have the legitimate impression of speaking about something else. And yet, as one participant lucidly observed: “It is also you who see it that way.” The gaze always speaks as much of the one who looks as of the image being looked at. What is apparently said about the image is also, without our having decided so, said about ourselves.

Polysemy as lived experience

When ten people in turn look at the same image and each says what they see in it, we witness in real time a phenomenon that no theoretical discourse could have made as tangible. One person sees freedom in it; another sees confinement. One sees a door opening; another sees a door closing. These readings do not cancel each other out; they coexist.

This experience of polysemy is, to my mind, more structuring when we live it through the images of others than when we live it through our own. When it is our image being looked at, the emotion of being the object of the collective gaze takes up our attention. We hear what is being said, but we are also wrestling with what we feel as we hear it. When it is another person’s image, we are free to listen to what is being said, and to observe, ten times in the course of a morning, that the same image has produced readings that are sometimes opposed, all true, all singular.

This observation, made together and renewed image after image, is not abstract knowledge about the subjectivity of perception. It is a tested demonstration. It has a direct consequence for the reading of images in everyday life: if each person sees differently, then anyone who claims that an image has a single meaning, whether a journalist, a politician, or an advertiser, is presenting their interpretation as a truth. This is what propaganda does: imposing a single meaning on images that carry several. The photographic workshop, by giving collective experience to the plurality of readings, constitutes a lived antidote to manipulation through images.

In Camera Lucida (1980), Roland Barthes distinguished between the studium, what the image shows in a coded and culturally legible way, and the punctum, the detail that pierces the viewer, that touches them personally without their always knowing why. The collective gaze allows the studia and puncta of every person to coexist. What pierces one person does not pierce another. And it is in this coexistence of singular gazes, more than in any discourse on plurality, that the richness of the image manifests itself.

What others see in us

When our own image’s turn comes and the others speak, the collective gaze reveals things about ourselves that we were carrying without knowing it, and that the machine has captured. The mechanical image, because it records without filter, fixes unconscious traces that the gaze of the group makes visible.

I have seen people deeply moved by what others saw in their image. Not wounded: the frame is benevolent, and the responses are formulated in terms of perception and feeling, not judgment. But touched profoundly, by something they did not know they had expressed and which, nevertheless, was indeed there, visible to others, inscribed in the image by a gesture they had not fully mastered.

Carl Gustav Jung distinguished the personal unconscious, made up of what the subject has repressed, from the collective unconscious, populated by symbols and shared cultural resonances. Both pass through the creative gesture. Photography is particularly revealing in this respect because the machine captures everything in front of it, including what we did not intend to capture. The background, the light, a reflection, a shadow, a detail that escaped us at the moment of taking the picture — all of this enters the frame, and the gaze of others sometimes finds in it a meaning whose presence we did not suspect.

In his three-level model of empathy, Serge Tisseron names intersubjective empathy, or reciprocal empathy, the capacity to accept that another person can discover us and shed light on ourselves. This is the third level of his model, the most demanding, the one that requires sufficient trust to be risked. The protocol creates the conditions for this empathy. The author’s silence protects the freedom of speech of the others; the benevolent frame, which is held by the fact that everyone takes part, including the person facilitating the workshop, protects the author’s capacity to receive what is said to them without feeling threatened.

The construction of the self is collective work

Three phenomena have emerged so far: emotional expression authorizes itself through the detour, polysemy becomes a lived experience, and the collective gaze reveals what the author was carrying without knowing it. All three put others into play in the formation of the self, and this putting-into-play is constitutive of the self itself.

In Mind, Self and Society (1934), George Herbert Mead held that the self is not a prior given that social interaction would then dress up. The self comes into being in interaction. It is constructed by internalizing the gaze of others, and in particular what Mead calls the generalized other, that is, the collective perspective of a group or community. To become a subject, for Mead, is to learn to see oneself through the eyes of others, and to anticipate their reactions. The self is dialogical through and through, made of moments in which one takes oneself as an object from the standpoint of another.

A few years earlier, the American sociologist Charles Cooley had formulated the same intuition under the name of the looking-glass self. According to him, the image we have of ourselves forms from the image we imagine others have of us. Three moments are involved: the imagination of how we appear to the other, the imagination of the judgment they pass on this appearance, and the resulting feeling of self (pride, shame, confidence). Our subjective identity, in this reading, is wholly a matter of received and anticipated gazes.

On the side of developmental psychology, in Thought and Language (1934), Lev Vygotsky showed that higher psychic functions always appear twice in a child’s development: first as a collective, shared activity in the relationship to the other, then as an inner, internalized activity. Consciousness is first a dialogue with the other before becoming a dialogue with oneself. To think is to internalize a conversation.

These contributions converge on a simple thesis: the construction of the self is not a process that would unfold in the secrecy of the individual, and would then seek to be recognized by others. It is, from the very beginning, collective work. The gaze I bring to others, the empathy I grant them, the gaze they bring to me, the sense I have of their gaze: all of this constitutes me. And reciprocally, the gaze I bring to them constitutes them. We fashion one another, continually, through this fabric of mutual attention and recognition.

In The Struggle for Recognition (1992), the philosopher Axel Honneth gave a political formulation to this intuition. Human identity, he writes, is formed through three orders of recognition: love, which recognizes the person in their intimacy; rights, which recognize them as equal; social esteem, which recognizes their singular contribution to common life. Where recognition is missing, the subject is wounded in their relationship to themselves. The collective gaze on images touches directly on this third form of recognition, but in a particular way: it is recognition between peers, which goes through no jury, and which rests solely on the fact that each person receives what the others have made and takes it seriously as a contribution to the common space of the group.

Donald Winnicott, for his part, had drawn attention to the role of the mirror in the primary formation of the subject: it is by seeing themselves reflected in the mother’s face, in the way she welcomes and names their states, that the small child forms a first image of themselves. The collective gaze on images mobilizes, at another age and in another setting, an analogous function. The others do not return to us an exact reflection; they return to us a reading, which is also an elaboration. And it is in this gap, between what I thought I had placed in the image and what comes back from it, that something of the self is discovered and constructed.

The detour through the other: what family constellations illuminate

The German therapist Bert Hellinger developed in the 1990s, under the name of family constellations, a practice very far removed from the photographic workshop but which sheds light on what is at play in it. The protocol, simplified, consists in inviting participants to embody members of someone’s family (the father, the mother, a grandparent, a brother, a sister, a deceased child) by placing them in space in relation to one another. Once in position, these representatives often report feeling emotions, tensions, attractions, or repulsions they had not experienced before occupying that place, and which seem to correspond to dynamics specific to the family system of the person being accompanied.

Hellinger’s work is controversial, and I endorse neither its metaphysics nor certain of his political positions. But the phenomenon observed in the practice of constellations bears directly on our subject. How is it that people who know nothing of a family history begin to feel, in their bodies, sensations that seem to belong to that history? Several hypotheses circulate: the non-verbal transmission of information through the posture, tone of voice, and breathing of the person being accompanied; the role of the group’s projections; a frame effect that amplifies receptivity. What is certain is that something circulates in the group that exceeds individual words and intentions, and that passes through bodies, positions, and the occupation of shared space.

This circulation has something to do with what happens in the photographic workshop. When a person says what they see in another’s image, they gain access to affective contents (their own, those of the image, perhaps those of the other) that they could not have voiced in their own name. When we hear others speak about our image, we learn things about ourselves that introspection alone would not have delivered. In both cases, the detour is productive. One must pass through an object (the image) or a figure (the position of someone close) for what could not be said frontally to emerge.

What family constellations illuminate, and what the collective gaze on images implements in its own way, is the productivity of the detour. The subject gains access to what they carry through a passage: they externalize themselves in a medium (a photograph taken, a position occupied), then entrust this medium to the gaze or the felt sense of others. It is this passage through exteriority that makes access possible.

The facilitator, exposed

There is a moment I always await with a mixture of apprehension and curiosity: the moment when my own photograph is being looked at. Because I take part in the exercise. I take a photograph, I post it online with the others, I submit it to the group’s gaze like everyone else. And when my turn comes, I keep silent like everyone else.

Someone once told me: “When it was your photograph, it did something strange to me. Even though you take part on the same level as we do, in my head there was still that frame of you being the facilitator. I had a small moment of: oh, here we are, on our own.” The fact that the facilitator takes part does not erase the asymmetry of the relationship. It is structural; it belongs to the function and to the role. To expose oneself to the same risk as the others, to make oneself vulnerable in the same way, changes the charge of this asymmetry without changing its nature.

If I did not do so, I would be the one who looks without being looked at. I would be in a position of overhang within a setting that claims precisely to work on the circulation of gazes. The reciprocal construction discussed above would no longer take place for me. I would be outside the common fabric, contemplating it from the outside, and the mediation would reproduce the vertical relation it claims to overcome. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), Paulo Freire insists that education can only be emancipatory if the educator accepts to be transformed themselves in the process. To facilitate a workshop on the collective gaze without exposing oneself like the others would be precisely the soft mode of domination Freire warned against.

First names: an act of symbolization

Each image is renamed with the first name of the person who made it. This gesture, apparently technical, is an act of symbolization. The first name binds the image to an identity. It says: this image belongs to this person. It bears their name. It exists in the common space as their singular contribution.

Without the first name, there would be a form of identitary dissolution. The images would be anonymous and interchangeable; they would be no one’s images. The stake of the exercise is identitary. It is about making each person exist in a shared symbolic space, giving them a place. Not a hierarchical place, not a grade, but a place. Something that says: you are here, you have made something that bears your name, and the others have seen it.

Jacques Lacan speaks of inscription in the symbolic as the condition of the subject’s psychic existence. To be named is to exist for the other. To make the image exist with the first name of its author is to make this person exist within the symbolic register of the group. Someone who did not have their image in the shared space would not have lived the same experience. Their absence from the common symbolic would be a form of violence.

Construction of the self, not validation

I often hear professionals in mediation or education speak of “validating” people through creative workshops. I am very wary of this word. To validate someone presupposes that they were devalued. It places one in a position of power in which one would have the capacity to bestow value upon another. And it also implicitly contains the possibility of devaluation: if I can validate you today, I can devalue you tomorrow.

What interests me is not validation but construction. In the collective gaze, the others do not say “it is beautiful, well made, well done”; they say what they see. And what they see goes far beyond what the person believed they had made. Someone who thought they had taken a “bad” photograph because they are not a photographer hears the others find in their image a richness they had not imagined. And because that person has themselves participated in the gaze on the others’ images, and because they know their own responses were sincere, they know that the others’ responses are sincere too. This is not flattery, it is a discovery.

This construction is made possible by the fabric of mutual gazes analyzed above. It is inseparable from the fact that each person has, in turn, given their gaze to the others’ images. Recognition received is inseparable from recognition given. This is what distinguishes a horizontal setting of reciprocal construction from a vertical setting in which an authority would validate participants.

Toward a method: the symbolizing detour

What is at play in the collective gaze on images can be named. I propose to call symbolizing detour the mechanism that allows a subject to access charged psychic contents (emotions, sensations, unrecognized parts of the self, difficult affects) by passing through a third object or through a figure of otherness, rather than through direct introspection. The symbolizing detour belongs to the same spirit as what I have elsewhere called the machinic third, but it broadens its scope. The machine is only one particular case of the third object. Another person’s image, the position of someone close in a constellation, the character of a fairy tale, a role in a play, can in various ways function as symbolizing detours.

The symbolizing detour has two characteristics. On the one hand, it makes thinkable what could not be thought frontally. Asking someone “what are you feeling right now?” often blocks expression. Asking “what do you see in this image?” allows it. On the other hand, it brings to light that what the subject says about the object also concerns them, without their having decided it should. The detour does not mask the subject; it reveals them, while leaving them the possibility of not quite knowing it.

To this concept corresponds a second one, which is not new but which must be kept at the center of mediation’s concerns: the reciprocal construction of the self. The person who comes to a workshop is not constructed there by being validated by a facilitator, but by participating in a fabric of mutual gazes in which they receive from others and give to others. The role of mediation is to hold the frame of this circulation, and not to exclude itself from it.

These two concepts (the symbolizing detour and reciprocal construction) are not reserved for the photographic workshop. They hold for any mediation in which people gather around a common object. In a writing workshop, the text the others read functions as a detour. In a theater workshop, the character played authorizes words the person would not allow themselves to say. In a group practice-analysis session, a colleague’s experience can serve to elaborate one’s own. On a museum visit commented by several voices, what is said about a work also says something about each person. To identify the symbolizing detour at work in a setting is to give oneself the means to care for it. To recognize reciprocal construction as the real stake is to stop thinking of oneself as a distributor of value, and to accept being oneself, as a professional, a stakeholder in the fabric being woven.