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 and who wants to get better at using them.
The newsletter is rooted in the creative industry, particularly around illustration because that is what I used to do before my PhD. It analyses the modes of production, circulation, and evaluation of images at a time where generative AI promises to upset this already fragile practice. From there, a broader kind of letters 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 doctoral researcher in anthropology at the University of Cambridge studying how people (and machines) look together and against each other.
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. It might be a couple of times a month, sometimes less. One thing is sure: I won’t spam you with half-baked hot takes for the sake of consistency.
I hope you’ll consider becoming a paying subscriber. I spend a lot of time and energy researching each essay and it means the world to me when someone deems it valuable enough to pay for that work!
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 illustration 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
The End of Photographic Evidence, Again— An essay on the wholesale of epistemic revolution by companies developing generative AI models
