A Conversation with Brian Jacobson March 02, 2021 Caltech's new professor of visual culture wants his students to learn to see—closely, critically, and contextually. Given that Brian Jacobson's earlier research focused on the architecture of film studio buildings, his affinity for the L.A. area comes as no surprise. He joined Caltech in the summer of 2020 from the University of Toronto, where he taught cinema studies and history, after earning his PhD at USC. Hired as part of the Caltech-Huntington Program in Visual Culture, which launched in 2018 with grant funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Caltech's new visual culture professor has lately been interested in a far different research area: the visual culture of the oil and gas industry in 1950s France. We talked with Jacobson about visual literacy, the selfie through history, and how to sell a pipeline to the public.