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Seeing Visual Culture - Coggle Diagram
Seeing Visual Culture
Illusion/Truth: Visual culture is not always how it seems at first glance. When we see things, we must discern whether what we see is the truth, or whether it is deception
LA Glows - Lawrence Weschler : The LA light appears different, because of a variety of factors (air, location, etc.) that makes it attractive to many.
You Who Look - James Turrell : Light is used as a medium to create art instead,
The Allegory of the Cave from The Republic, Book VII - Plato : People of the cave are under the illusion that their life, as a story to tell about the illusion of life that most commonfolk live, and how hard and painful the truth is.
Light as a Metaphor for Truth: At the Preliminary Stage of Philosophical Concept Formation - Hans Blumenberg
"The Invention of Painting"
Painting is a form of mimicry. It involves some truth, and some illusion, as no painting perfectly captures its subject.
"All Black EVerything" - Jared Sexton : Black is often thought of as absence of color, but also it is the combination of all colors, inclusive, encompassing, generous, generative.
"Photograph, Darkness, and the Underground Railroad: Dawoud Bey's Night Coming Tenderly, Black" - Shawn Michelle Smith : Speaks of the underground railroad, bringing light to a previously hidden and well-kept secret. Darkness must be expressed, not suppressed to portray history accurately.
"Night Coming Tenderly, Black" - Dawoud Bey : History told through a series of photographs, that represents African Americans and their side of history.
"Light as a metaphor for Truth: At the Preliminary Stage of Philosophical Concept Formation" - Hans Blumenberg : Truth is compared to light, and how light often illuminates, leads to salvation, and identity.
"Blindness and Visual Culture: An Eyewitness Account" - Georgina Kleege : Although sighted people have sight, often blind people know more about what it means to be sighted than sighted people know what it's like to be blind
Excerpts from "Interaction of Color" - Joseph Albers : Color changes depending on how it is viewed, in contrast with other colors.
"How not to be Seen" - Monty Python : Not being seen is impossible, no matter how hard we try.
"Using Black to Paint Light: Walking Through a Matisse Exhibit Thinking about the Arctic and Matthew Henson" Robert Coste Lewis : "The unanticipated shock: so much believed to be white is actually—strikingly—blue. Endless blueness. White is blue." Blue permeates landscape, not white. The perception of white was deception, as blue becomes omnipresent in our lives.
A Short History of the Shadow: an Interview with Victor I. Stoichita : Shadows are associated with absence of light, death. Shadow evades our recognition until ages eight or nine. Before then, we cannot recognize i.
Absence/Void/Loss: When one thinks of visual culture, we automatically shift to what we see, but sometimes equally, if not more important, is what can't be seen.
: this picture involves the absence of nobel peace prize winner Liu Xiaobo. Picture proves how powerful absence can be.
The Image and the Void - Trinh Minh-Ha : Expands on emptiness, what we think about it, and the inability to see what's coming.
Living space purged of color. The absence of color and monotony of this room is almost as disorienting as a room full of color.
Ad Reinhardt
The lack of color in these paintings, or rather, the mixture of all colors, leads to black. In turn, when we mix all paints, we lose the identities of the individual colors mixed, resulting in indistinguishable blacks.
[Three Colors: Blue]
Blue displays a strong sense of loss, with the absence.
"Colors/Black" - Paul LaFarge : Black as a void of light." We “see” in total darkness because sight itself has a color," the color of the void.
Three Colors: Blue (Film) : Loss, grief following a car accident, and how she struggles to find new identity
Blue (Film) - Derek Jarman : Describes battle with AIDS, confusion, loss, void of any visual stimulation other than a blue screen.
"Blue Lollipop" - Carol Mavor : Blue in the film, "Three Colors: Blue" permeates the whole scene, perfectly describing its relation to the movie concerning innocence, her daughter, sex, and youth.
"The Evolution of Art towards the Immaterial : "Yves Klein : Blue is abstract, relates to nothingness, dimensionless
Identity: When considering visual culture, we cannot dissociate visual culture from identity. Identity permeates every object and it is important to be able to identify what power they have and when they shift.
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Gaze : how one is seen
Citizen - Claudia Rankine : She is hypervisible, where her race is the defining characteristic of her, leading to her being trapped by it, and being gazed upon.
Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison : People gaze and judge him negatively based off the color of his skin, but nothing else. His true identity, and colors are invisible.
: the light in this photograph illuminates the faces of the kids most in this photograph. Equally important is the gaze of the children, looking inward at the model, faces lit with curiousity.
Blonde Venus : Film making commentary on elusive and sexual portrayal of woman, how Blonde Venus portrays herself to be seen, and how she capitalizes on it
"The Fact oF Blackness" - Franz Fanon : Black people are always under the gaze, objectified, and started at by white people
"Colored People, Slow Fade to Black" Carrie Mae Weems : No matter what color filter we are shown, black people are still perceived as black; play on black people as people of "color"
"The Color of Subjectivity" - Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison : Expression of color comes from within oneself.
"A Child's View of Color" - Walter Benjamin - Children see color in a way that isn't tainted. They are innocent, creative, curious, and don't think about implications of what they see.
All Light, Everywhere : Discusses surveillance technology in body cameras, bias in how humans see things. Surveillance technology grows in usage.
"Invisible Images (Your Pictures Are Looking At You)" - Trevor Paglen : Images gaze back at us. Human gazes don't meet many pictures now, as they are for machine-to-machine. We need to unlearn how to see like humans, and "see a parallel universe" for new visual culture for machines
"The Whiteness of the Whale" - Herman Melville : White is a sign of innocence, beauty. White's usage leads to a better impression in history.
Intentionality/Manipulation: Behind visual culture, more times than not, there is an element of intentionality, and even manipulation behind how things look and how they are portrayed. Exploring these ideas is important to understanding how we understand visual culture.
"How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational : teaches us how not to be seen, intent not to be seen, and how to hide; what it means to be invisible.
The Wizard of Oz : The use of sepia tones and color to illustrate themes is intentional, making color an integral part of the plot, instead of just an fancy new feature of film.
Invasion - Being watched, or being invaded or overwhelmed
"Panopticism" - Michel Foucault : Individual isn't watched at all times, but is under the impression that they are watched at all times, leading to one monitoring oneself
"Into the Blue" - Derek Jarman : Blue is omnipresent, invasive, especially in the opening,
"White" - Richard Dyer : White dominates society, where whites hold power, but only against other colors, other races. Must invade other colors to gain this power.
Picture of the panopticon. The panopticon features a constant feeling of invasion, where even though one may not always feel like they're being watched, they are.
The Wizard of Oz
The Wicked Witch of the West invades and manipulates Dorothy's journey by using magic to make her fall asleep in a field of poppies to stop her.
"Whitescapes" - David Batchelor - Whiteness permeates spaces so much that it becomes overwhelming and invasive.
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