Please enable JavaScript.

Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.

Seeing Visual Culture - Coggle Diagram

- - - - Georgina Kleege Blindness and Visual Culture: An Eyewitness Account: "the average blind person knows more about what it means to be sighted than the average sighted person knows about what it means to be blind" (179). Kleege argues that the language of our world is the language of and for the sighted.
      - Georgina Kleege Molyneux Redux: Kleege describes a thought experiment involving a hypothetical blind person who has their sight restored and is able to see for the first time. She explains that "even totally, congenitally blind people in the industrialized world tend to have mainstream educations and to be exposed to all sorts of visual terms and concepts," further illustrating that the language of our world is the language of the sighted.
  - - - Claudia Rankine Citizen: "For so long you thought the ambition of racist language was to denigrate and erase you as a person...you begin to understand yourself as rendered hypervisible in the face of such language acts. Language that feels hurtful is intended to exploit all the ways that you are present" (49). Rankine describes the experience of being a Black woman, and the ways in which she is rendered invisible and hypervisible.
      - Ralph Ellison Invisible Man: This text chronicles the life and experiences of an unnamed Black man. He describes himself as invisible because he is not seen by others due to his race. He steals light to light his basement, making himself hypervisible and better able to see himself.
      - Syreeta McFadden Teaching the Camera to See My Skin: "What extraordinary witchcraft that 20th century photography managed to erase or distort us in its gaze!" (5). This text describes the flawed design of film and cameras that fail to accurately represent black skin. As a result, Black people are misrepresented and are even turned invisible. If film was exposed for a white child, the black child next to them would be rendered invisible other than their eyes and teeth.
      - Paul La Farge Colors/Black: "We 'see' in total darkness because sight itself has a color, Aristotle suggests, and that color is black." This text suggests that black makes the darkness, or the invisible, visible.
      - Jared Sexton All Black Everything: “To truly see black would require the loss of any visible light, meaning in fact that all would be black.” (4). Black is the absence of visible light, and is therefore the invisible. When you see black, it is making the invisible visible.
      - Darkness
        
        Shawn Michelle Smith Photography, Darkness, and the Underground Railroad: Dawoud Bey's Night Coming Tenderly, Black: "On seeing Dawoud Bey's Night Coming Tenderly, Black (2017) for the first time, one is struck by all the darkness. Against the white walls of the gallery, the large dark prints that constitute the series resemble a minimalist Installation of black rectangular panels. But in looking more closely, spending time and allowing one's vision to adjust to the subdued registers, one realizes that she can see quite a bit" (25).
        
        Dawoud Bey Night Coming Tenderly, Black: By photographing pieces and landmarks from the Underground Railroad, Bey makes Black history visible. By photographing these subjects at twilight, Bey hoped to "hold darkness Itself in a tender embrace," and makes darkness visible to the viewer.
        
        Blueness
        
        Derek Jarman Into the Blue and Blue: "Blue protects white from innocence / Blue drags black with it / Blue is darkness made visible" (114).
        
        Robin Coste Lewis Using Black to Paint Light: Walking Through a Matisse Exhibit Thinking about the Arctic and Matthew Henson: In this text, Coste Lewis writes "so much believed to be white is actually—strikingly—blue." She describes the lack of visibility of blue, then, as it is often mistaken for white. She further comments on visibility when describing her accident: "Because it was dark, I could see, really see—for the first time—how a particular gold thread sparkled on the collar. I reached out my hand. But before the wall, there was a large hole where stairs were being built, which I could not see." In these lines, she juxtaposes the visibility of the thread, even in the dark, with the invisibility of the hole that she fell through.
      - Carrie Mae Weems Colored People, Slow Fade to Black: Through her photography, and use of color to photograph black skin, Weems makes blackness visible and avoids the "flattening" effect that film generally has on black skin. These photographs more accurately capture and make visible her subjects.
    - - Whiteness
        
        Richard Dyer White: In this text, Dyer asserts that whiteness is the default in film, and is therefore seen as the ordinary way of being human. Whiteness is seen as the norm, and thus is invisible. He argues that, in order for whiteness to no longer be the default, whiteness needs to be made visible.
        
        Hilaria Loyo Blinding Blondes: This text makes "whiteness visible by studying the 'blinding blonde' stereotype—also referred to as 'platinum blonde' or 'glamour blonde'—as a category marked as white from the onset by an artificially bright shade of hair color" (179).
        
        Joseph von Sernberg Blonde Venus: In this film, there is a scene in which the main character performs in a gorilla suit in an attempt to perform and mimic blackness. When she takes off the gorilla suit, her whiteness is even more visible as a result.
      - Robert Rauschenberg White Paintings: These paintings are a series of canvases painted entirely white. By painting the canvas white, Rauschenberg makes white visible. He also makes light and shadow visible, as the white canvases reflect changes in light and shadow.
      - Yves Klein
        
        Yves Klein Le Vide: This piece is an empty gallery space painted white. This whitewashing of space, and it being the focus of this gallery space, makes the color white visible.
        
        Yves Klein Untitled White Monochrome: This piece is a white monochrome, made of "dry pigment and synthetic resin on thin canvas mounted on panel." The whiteness of the canvas makes white visible.
  - - - Monty Python How Not to Be Seen: This short film uses humor to illustrate the important difference between seeing and not seeing someone, or being seen and not being seen by another person. In a game of hide and seek with the camera, those who are seen end up being killed.
      - Hito Steyerl How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File: In the first part of this short film, the film visually demonstrates how to make something invisible. This invisibility is synonymous with the camera not seeing what is being hidden.
      - Theo Anthony All Light Everywhere: In this film, several instances are showcased that illustrate the difference between seeing and not seeing. One example is police body cameras, in which the police officer themself is not seen, but everything else supposedly is seen, including things that the officer may not have even seen.
- - - - Michel Foucault Panopticism: Foucault describes a structure, conceived by Bentham, called the panopticon that allows a central figure to see all of the people in the surrounding cells. This central figure, due to their position of surveillance, is in a position of power and is able to control the actions of those they are watching through surveillance.
      - Vito Acconci Following Piece: In this piece, Acconci followed unsuspecting people through public spaces in New York City. This act is reminiscent of stalking, and involves a lack of consent from the person he is following. The absence of consent creates a power dynamic in which the follower is in power and controlling the situation, while the person being followed is unaware, vulnerable, and powerless as a result.
      - Sophie Calle Suite Venitienne: Calle followed a man across Venice without his knowledge or consent, producing a power dynamic in which she was aware of her surveillance and in control of it, while he was not. She further maintained control over the relationship by continuing to watch and follow him even after being caught by the man and asked not to follow him,
      - Trevor Paglen Invisible Images: "The invisible world of images isn't simply an alternative taxonomy of visuality. It is an active, cunning, exercise of power"
  - - - Albers Color Study: Make opaque colors appear transparent
    - - Carol Mavor Blue Mythologies: "Julie eats the child as food, swallows her whole in order to entomb her" (136). When Julie eats the lollipop, she attempts to entomb Anna, thereby controlling and gaining power over her grief and her family's death.
      - Krzysztov Kieslowski Three Colors: Blue: In this film, Julie tries to maintain some power over her own life after losing her daughter and her husband, whose deaths were out of her control. She does this by getting rid of her belongings, all except for her daughter's mobile, and attempting to leave behind her old life. Through this, she hopes to regain the power to control her life.