••• What are “scopic regimes”? •••

Recent it has become rather common to tackle historical questions of visual culture in terms of "scopic regimes" (the term has been coined by the French film critic Christian Metz and has now been widely adopted), i.e. of culturally specific ways of seeing that replace the traditional definition of "vision" as a universal and natural phenomenon. The advantage of the concept of "scopic regime" is that it supersedes the traditional discussion between technological determinism (in this view, the cultural meaning of a technique or an artefact is determined by technology) and social construction (in this view, it is culture that gives meaning to technology). In the case of scopic regimes, culture and technology interact.

By foregrounding the notion of "scopic regime", one emphasizes the fact

This image is part of a cartoon that represents the clash between the previous scopic regime (the painted portrait) and the new regime of photography

••• Examples of scopic regimes •••

A simple example of such a scopic regime is the difference between the way our culture constructs the difference between fiction and documentary (see Time, story and memory). Some elements "trigger" a fictional gaze (for instance the fact that the beholder is sitting in the dark: looking at a movie in a theatre is for this reason more "fictional" than looking at the same movie on television in our living-room), which in its turn determines specific ways of seeing (in fiction, for instance, we are more eager to construct stories in order to make sense of what we see, whereas a documentary gaze is less bothered by the possible fragmentation of what is displayed).

Other well-known examples of differences in scopic regimes follow for instance lines of class and gender:

• In the case of gender, one opposes the "male" gaze (more interested in grasping the subject of a picture, in a "typically" voyeuristic and sadistic male gesture) and the "female" glance (more interested in browsing the materiality of the visual surface, in a "typically" female attitude of non-dominant behaviour)
• In the case of class, one opposes the "formalist", aesthetic, and art-historical look of the bourgeois culture (critics and arts lovers), who thereby puts between brackets the historical context of the picture, and the "political" look of the dominated classes, more interested in questions of social meaning and relevance.

••• Photography and scopic regimes •••

As far as photography is concerned, the idea of a two-ways traffic between scopic regime and cultural background should be maintained (our ways of looking determine our culture and vice versa). It is obvious that photography is part of visual culture and thus influenced by the scopic regime(s) of the day (or the year, or the decade, or the era). Yet it does much more than simply reflecting the general characteristics of a given period with its own scopic regimes. As the "oldest" of the "new media", photography has often had and often still has a pioneering function in the definition of our scopic regimes.

In this regard, a minimal survey of some major shifts should retain at least the following elements:

The almost museal display of photographs in this gallery of the best known photographer in New York in those years, demonstrates the encounter and the blurring of various scopic regimes

• Photography as an expression/instrument of power (see the illustration for an example): By documenting the world and by enabling comparisons between people, photography can be used to impose ideas on what is "normal" and what is "deviant". this new way of looking determines then a reading of photography as a way of disciplining the subject by treating it "objectively", i.e. by confronting it with external standards, with statistic norms, and by forcing it to adhere to these laws, under penalty of exclusion (a seminal and highly influential study in this regard is Crary 1991).
• Photography as expression/instrument of naturalism and positivism: This seems to be a stereotype, but the cultural underpinnings and consequences of such a stance are considerable: photography has increased our eagerness to see everything, also that what could not be seen before, hence a phenomenon called the "frenzy of seeing" beyond the already known (of which the explosion of pornography is only one of the aspects)
• Photography as an illustration of a "mechanical" way of seeing that is by definition "un-artistic": This stance has been at heart of the 19th century quarrel on photography as technology versus photography, as art versus photography.
• Photography as expression/instrument of a new type of "autonomous" art, during the period of "high-modernism" and its emphasizing of art's autotelism (one might consider this the encounter between photography and abstract art, but is probably more correct to see in it the influence of modernism's tendency towards "structural differentiation"). This autonomous scopic regime has also something to do with the post-romantic promotion of the autonomous artist, i.e. the idea that a photographer "sees" what others don't see (a basic element in this discussion is photography's institutionalization and musealization: in 1938, Walker Evans is the first photograph ever to have a one man exhibition at the MOMA);
• The current doxa of the photographer as able to select the "decisive moment": Cartier-Bresson, bears witness of the lasting influence of this "autonomous" artistic regime and reflects the post-romantic doxa of the photographer as being capable of catching at the surface an "unseen" truth.
• Photography as belonging to a passed era: Photography is split between "analogous" ("real", "indexical") photography and "digital" ("simulated", "non-indexical") photography (see Post-photography?).

If most specialists tend to multiply and pluralize the notion of scopic regime, there exist also attempts to define photography as "one" specific type of scopic regime. A most interesting case here are the ideas by Sorlin (Sorlin 1997: 84 and passim), who tries to define what are the major distinctive features of the "photographic way of seeing" (i.e. of seeing through and with the help of photography, which Sorlin beliefs to be the characteristic way of seeing in Western culture between 1839 and the emergence of the moving image: film, television, video):

• The production of events (which are often "non-events"): Photography pushes us to "fix" moments, i.e. to give them a particular status, but it appears very often that these moments are "meaningless".
• The development of the portrait: More than other visual media photography has put this "genre" to the foreground.
• The representation of the body: The favourite subject of the photographic look is the body

It is furthermore of utter importance to stress that such scopic regimes are often paradoxical and in conflict with each other. The relationship between these ideas, regimes, convictions, preferences, prejudices, etc. is not one of successive but of overlapping and contradicting layers.

• A good example of such a conflict is the way writers of the Victorian era used the modern technology of photography in order to reinforce their nostalgic, anti-modern program. Although they made an extensive use of photographic illustrations, these images were not intended to stress the "modernity" of their writings. Instead of that, photography was considered a tool to take fragments out of time and to insert them in a kind of supra-temporal, eternal world that escaped from the rapid and radical changes of the day.
• Our contemporary ideas are obviously obeying two very different directions concerning the picture's indexicality:  19^th century naturalism versus contemporary loss of faith in the photography's documentary values

Hence the importance to make always enquiries on authorship and readership.