Welcome to On Looking
Hi there,
You already know it: we live in a visual world saturated with images. From advertising and art galleries to AI-powered surveillance and social media, images are everywhere, and we spend more time looking at them.
But while we’ve all learned to read texts, we were never taught to look at images. On Looking explores what it means to make, circulate, and look at pictures to develop better ways of seeing our world.
On Looking is for anyone with eyes who wants to improve how they use them.
The newsletter is rooted in the creative industry, particularly around illustration. It analyses the modes of production, circulation, and evaluation of these images at a time where generative AI promises to upset this already fragile practice.
From there, a broader kind of letter about visual culture at large grows, from AI to photographs of royalty, black holes, and the ownership of colours.
Who’s writing?
My name is Julien Posture, I’m an illustrator and anthropologist. I’ve been active in the creative industry since 2018 with clients such as The New York Times, The Guardian and The New Yorker.
I’m a PhD researcher in anthropology at the University of Cambridge. My research explores how people (and machines) can look together and against each other. Following images from illustrators' studios to publication offices and from AI laboratories to class-action lawsuits, I’m charting how these ways of seeing interact and sometimes compete in shaping the value of creative labour.
I’m passionate about visual culture and the role of looking in our societies. My writing has appeared in Eye On Design and Siggi : le magazine de sociologie, and It’s Nice That. I’ve given talks about art, creativity, and capitalism at universities in the UK, Germany, France, and Canada.
If you’d like to know more about my work, you can visit my website or Instagram.
What to expect?
Unlike a large portion of the internet, I try to only take the mic when I have something to say. Sometimes, it might be a couple of times a month, sometimes less. One thing is sure: I won’t spam you with half-baked ideas for the sake of consistency.
Still need to be convinced? Here are some of my favourite essays:
Letters from the field #1 — A good introduction to my research in New York’s creative industry
Kate Middleton’s photo — About our post-AI ways of looking at images
Unionizing illustrators — An interview about the potential and challenges of unionizing artists in the US
Quitting illustration — A great community thread about the precariousness of illustrators’ jobs
Illustration without Illustrators — A primer on AI art and how it fits within pre-existing issues in the creative industry
