Welcome to On Looking
About On Looking
On Looking is a publication about images and how to look at them.
We live in a visual world, saturated with images, yet no one taught us how to see. On Looking investigates the cultural, economic and political life of images to develop critical ways of engaging with them.
The newsletter is rooted in the creative industry, particularly around illustration, and 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 grows a broader kind of letters about visual culture at large, 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 NBC News.
I’m currently a PhD researcher in anthropology at the University of Cambridge, my research addresses the ways different groups learn how to see the same object differently, and how these ways of seeing interact and compete in shaping the value of images. The groups I work with are illustrators, art directors, and machine learning models, who are all engaged in looking at images, particularly their style.
My writing has appeared in Eye On Design and Siggi : le magazine de sociologie and I’ve given talks about illustration, creativity and capitalism at universities in the UK, Germany, France and Canada.
For more on my work you can visit my website or Instagram.
What to expect?
I send a letter roughly every other week. For now, everything is free.
Some of my personal favourite to give you an idea:
Letters from the field #1 — A good introduction to my research in New York’s creative industry
Kate Middleton’s photo — About how 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 the illustrator’s job
Illustration without Illustrators — A primer on AI art and how it fits within pre-existing issues in the creative industry
