The Visible World

In his “Ways of Seeing” course, Professor Rattanamol Singh Johal introduces students to images of great works of art and architecture—the Parthenon, the Córdoba Mosque in Spain, Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Diptych, to name three. But before delving into materials, history, context, or technique, Johal asks students to note what they see.

Students work as a group before each class meeting to visually annotate a work of art in a digital drawing application. They might describe a color or a pattern, or observe that a figure is missing its head. Students may be familiar with the work of art or they may be looking at it for the first time. At this point, they don’t research or share what they already know. And, Johal says, this first step of the process is an opportunity for students to slow down their appreciation of the piece.

If one were to visually annotate Johal’s classroom, they might note a conspicuous lack of laptops. After implementing a device-free policy in his course, Johal observed that his students, relieved of the option to check something on Google or ChatGPT, began thinking more critically. They took notes by hand and became more engaged in class discussions. And Johal says his students have started asking better questions.

Johal’s class borrows its title from art historian John Berger’s 1972 BBC series and book of essays, Ways of Seeing, both of which examine the tradition of European oil painting, drawing connections between how these paintings are seen—from a 1970s eye—through filters of advertising, publicity, and cultural conventions.

In the opening scene of the BBC series, Berger takes an X-acto knife to a reproduction of Sandro Botticelli’s Venus and Mars painting, cuts a square around the subject’s head, and removes it from the painting’s large gilt frame. The aim of this dramatic gesture is an invitation to see an image in a fresh way. 

No paintings are harmed in the LSA class, but Johal, the Shireen and Afzal Ahmad Professor of South Asian Arts and an assistant professor in LSA’s Department of History of Art, presents his students with a similar invitation to see art with fresh eyes.

In a lesson on the Córdoba Mosque, students make observations about the image of the 8th century building. Questions then arise about the details of the mosque’s construction: varied columns, horseshoe arches, and alternating patterns of brick and stone.

These alternating materials (red brick and white stone) were used in the voussoirs, or wedge-shaped blocks that form the curve of the arch, Johal says, thereby allowing premodern builders to achieve a pattern that did not rely on painting and repainting.

The mish-mash of column and capital styles that a student points out is an example of spolia, the practice of adaptive reuse of building elements and materials throughout the history of architecture. Johal explains that Roman and Visigothic columns were repurposed for the mosque, which leads to a question about the building’s foundation and into a conversation about the 6th century Visigoth church that was there before.

The discussion goes on, taking students on a journey from the vast Umayyad empire to the kingdoms of 8th century Europe, from line and shape to meaning and understanding.

Johal’s students say that the course isn’t just valuable for someone pursuing art history as a career, but that it offers a toolkit for enhancing skills in critical thinking, research, attention to detail, and even the scientific method.

Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning student Zeinab Dabaja took the course during the Winter 2025 term and now recommends it to friends as “the perfect first-year seminar.” Her project on Frank Lloyd Wright helped her to develop an attunement to the use of light, furniture, and floorplans in residential interiors, and she plans to take those lessons into her career as an architect.

Current “Ways of Seeing” student Lauren Donley, who is pursuing a double major in biochemistry and history of art, says that the class’s emphasis on inquiry and data collection is helping her to communicate better in the lab and during presentations, and has improved her analytical skills with scientific literature.

For Eleanor Cook, a first-year student who hasn’t yet declared her major, the course is inspiring dreams of a career in museum curation. Cook, who loves literature, says, “The process of curating galleries is all about telling a story.”

Johal notes the broad applicability of these skills beyond academic disciplines. “In college students have the opportunity to build certain habits of thinking and tools of criticality that allow them to confront issues in the world,” he says. 

“As a humanistic field, art history alerts us to how we interpret the visual world and why that is significant in our daily life. … Content is a compelling vehicle in the course, but it’s not that they come out knowing about Picasso and Le Corbusier, it’s that they know how to interpret a visual object in the world.”

Berger’s book and BBC series landed in 1972, in a different world of images than the one that Johal’s students occupy in 2026.
 
“Back then [in the 1970s] you had to opt in,” Cook says. “You had to go to a museum, turn on the TV or open a magazine to see ads. But we can’t opt into brainrot or AI slop—it’s in the world, on the news, in social media, everywhere. We are less in control of the media we consume now.”

And Johal believes that the students of 2026 are actually eager to see the world more clearly, with both curiosity and healthy skepticism.

“Let’s be present for an hour and 20 minutes twice a week,” he says. “It’s not about memorizing and recalling. It’s about awareness of what it means to receive mediated images and content that have significant implications in terms of form and value, and about the visual and intellectual pleasure in sharing this experience.”

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