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Seeing Visual Culture..., Color Key: - Coggle Diagram

- - - - Camera
        
        Vito Acconci, Following Piece (1979)
        
        In this piece, Acconci follows strangers on the street takinng pictures with his camera until they disappear into a private space. Through the use of the camera, Acconci makes private life in public spaces visible. At the same time he highlights how cameras work as an object of surveillance and can become threatening. Visual culture is impacted by this quality of the camera, as it can make things and people who consider themselves unwatched visible.
        
        Dawoud Bey, "Night Coming Tenderly, Black"
        
        Bey's photographic series capture reimagined sites of the Underground Railroad. The black and white film was overexposed in the dark room, making the images appear darker. The darkness created through the technology of the camera lays a tenderness over the images and reimagines the night as a space of safety for fleeing enslaved people. Additionally, Bey's camera protects real places of the Underground railroad, as it only captures imaginative versions of the stations.
        
        Syreeta McFadden, "Teaching the Camera to See my Skin"
        
        In this essay, McFadden recounts the racist history of film photography. As a child, she knew, though [she] didn't understand why, that the lighter you were, the more likely it was that the camera — the film — got your likeness right." One reason for this lay in the Shirley Cards technitions used to develop film, which were always white women. By exposing the film for white skin, darker skin tones could not be properly represented by the technology: "With a white body as a light meter, all other skin tones become deviations from the norm." Only after Chocolate and Furniture companies complained did Kodak release a film geared towards capturing brown hues. McFadden's article shows how technology can limit representation in visual culture.
        
        whitewashing
        
        Carrie Mae Weems, *Colored People, Slow Fade to Black
        
        "Colored people, 1989-1990", literally:
        This is a series of portraits of black children, different ages, covered in colored filters (pink, green, sepia, blue, etc.).The camera
        tinges them in soft light, soothingly. Through the colors, the camera photographs them in a kind light.The children rarely look into the camera as if refusing to acknowledge them.
        Mae's portraiture reclaims the beauty and innocence of black children through photography after having been othered by color film photography for years.
        
        Using color and film to reclaim black bodies in photography
        
        tenderness of photography/film
        
        Sophie Calle, Suite Venitienne (1981)
        
        In her piece, Sohpie Calle follows a man from Paris to Venice, trying to follow in his steps. She captures moments and places where he has passed and takes pictures of him in private moments. Unlike Acconci, she invades privade spaces with her camera and travels over large distances. Calle's piece shows how the camera functions as a on object of surveillance that is dependent on the person using it. Calle is the one following the man, and operating the camera. Therefore, Calle's disturbing art project shows how systems of surveillance are constructed by humans.
      - Film
        
        Ingmar Bergman, Persona
        
        Persona tells the story of Elizabeth, a former actress who falls into a depressive episode and refuses to speak. She becomes friends with her nurse, Alma, who wishes for someone to listen to her. The film addresses their constructed identities as the two women begin to merge into one and questions the construction of social roles.
        The film also repeatedly calls attention to its own constructiveness. For example, the movie was filmed in black and white (by choice). Thereby, it exposes how the technology of film actively influences visual media production.
        
        painting with shadows
        
        Painting with Shadow
        
        Andrew Dosunmu, Andrew Bradford, Mother of George
        
        (see full description under Reflecting Systems > Social Systems > Gender)
        The directors use soft lighting to highlight the beauty of Black skin. By focusing the cinematography on capturing the unique qualities of Black skin, the film functions as activism against production choices of mainstream Hollywood, which tend to highlight White skin over Black.
        
        Stanley Cavell, "The World as a Whole: Color"
        
        Cavell describes how color has been used in film to "unify the profected world" by creating a "consistent regioin of make-belief" (82). Therefore, he says, it has been used to create phantasy worlds and utopias - a "private fantasy" (84) - which are not necessarily grounded in a realistic image of the current world. Therefore, the technology of color film functions to create believable worlds of fiction.
        
        Victor Fleming, The Wizard of Oz
        
        In the Wizard of Oz, the small-town girl Dorothy and her dog Toto are transported by a tornado into the wonderous land of Oz. To get back home, Dorothy travels to Emerald City to gain the help of the wonderful and powerful wizard of Oz. On her journey she meets three friends - the scarecrow, the tin man, and the lion - who help her overcome the Wicked Witch of the West who tries to stop Dorothy. Dorothy's fall into Oz is a fall into color: The beginning of the film in the "real world" is filmed in sepia tones. However, when Dorothy opens the door of her fallen house, she steps into colored film. The Wizard of Oz uses the technology of color film to convey a fantasticalness and unity of the world of Oz. At the same time, the different colors take on meanings that propell the plot of the movie forward. It is the nature of film as a film in color as opposed to black and white that informs the narrative of the movie.
        
        unity of color
      - Paint
        
        Le Corbusier, "A Coat of Whitewash: The Law of Ripolin"
        
        Corbusier proposes to coat the world in a layer of white paint. He acknowledges the morality of this act: "we would perform a moral act: to love purity" (82). As Corbusier explains, covering the world in Ripolin white paint would make it clean, "no more dirty, dark corners" (82). Corbusier's understanding of morality and culture is shaped by the material white paint of Ripolin.
        
        Robert Rauschenberg, White Paintings
        
        "This is a series of modular canvases, painted entirely white, which reflect changes in light and the chance effects of shadows in the surrounding space." In these monochrome paintings, it is the material quality of the pigment of the paint, together with the brush strokes that create angles on which the light reflects. Rauschenberg showcases the unique reflective quality of the color white through the physical nature of the paint
        
        Yves Klein, Untitled White Monochrome
        
        "Dry pigment and synthetic resin on thin canvas mounted on panel
        39 1/2 x 20 inch." The paint together with the resin creates texture on the canvas that reflect light on one side, and cast shadows on the other. Thereby the painting's white purity is impeded on by the texture of the paint. Moreover, Klein's title "white monochrome" implies that the painting is in one color. Therefore, the different shades of grey/white are unified under one color name.
        
        Yves Klein, Le Vide
        
        For this installation, Klein covered an entire room in white paint, with the exception of one cabinette. Its frame is black, and it stands out in the white room with its stark outline.
        In this artwork, Klein embraces the nothingness of whiteness by creating a colorless void. Through white paint, Klein tries to Find the immaterial (void) in the material (paint/pigment/color).
        
        Whitewashing
      - Hiroshi Sugimoto, "The Colors of Shadow"
        
        Sugimoto describes how tools influence our way of thinking and creating visual arts. Sugimoto sees tools as an extension of our hands that shape and sees her studio as a workshop. There, she has done her "share of inventing tools for realizing various art projects". In the photograph series she uses her workshop as a visually artful space that has the ability to paint the light in beautiful shadows.
      - Technology of Surveillance
        
        Trevor Paglen, "Invisible Images (Your Pictures are Looking at You)"
        
        Paglen explores how visual culture as been changed by the advent of modern technology like the internet and digital images. What he stresses as revolutionary is that digital images "is the fact that they are fundamentally machine-readable: they can only be seen by humans in special circumstances and for short periods of time." While he praises the new technology for its "automation of vision on an enormous scale", he warns against its dangers. By uploading pictures into the digital sphere, we feed powerful algorithms with information. They use these pictures to learn what different things look like, they look at us. However, as these machines are human programmed, they often perpetuate and reinstate racist stereotypes and turn Black bodies invisible.
        
        Hito Steyerl, How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File
        
        Steyerl examines how teechnology of surveillance influences human existence by teaching us how to not be seen by the technology. She shows us how to make something invisible to the camera, how to be invisible in plain sight, how to become invisible by becoming a picture, how to be invisible by disappearing, and how to become invisible by merging into a world of pictures. She shows the limits of surveillance technology through the resolution target, which measures a pictures resolution. If one can become equal to or smaller than a pixel as determined by the resolution chart one becomes invisible. Hito Steyerl celebrates the people who fall through the cracks of what cameras can capture as the "rogue pixels" dance and "hop off into low resolution". Not being seen then becomes celebratory and favorable to the constantly watching eye of modern technology.
        
        Theo Anthony, All Light, Everywhere
        
        In this documentary, Anthony follows the production of different technologies of surveillance, such as Axon body cameras and a surveillance plane.The film shows how systems of surveillance construct images that support structures of power and police Black bodies. For instance, the body camera is shown to distort vision and make the body of the police officer invisible. The evidence produced by the body camera is used not in favor of the accused but in favor of the police officer. Similarly, the surveillance airplane tends to fly most over areas where a large number of minorities lives, or over areas of Black protest. The film examines its own role as a constructed moving image and its context within the film industry as an accomplice of the perpetuation of oppressive social forces. Therefore, the film exposes how all images created through technology is constructed and not objective; and visusal media is inherently influenced by the technology it uses.
        
        camera as object of surveillance
        
        turns police body invisible
        
        turns police body invisible
        
        turns police body invisible
        
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        creates hypervisibility
        
        creates hypervisibility
        
        creates hypervisibility
    - - Eyes
        
        Joseph Albers, excerpts from Interaction of Colors
        
        "In visual perception a color is almost never seen as it really is - as it physically is."
        In the his color study, Joseph Albers makes clear how our eyes affect the way we see color. He shows how color is relational, depending on its surroundings. Our eyes in combination with our brain cannot be trusted to represent the world how "it really is - as it physically is", as Albers states.
        In his different experiements, Albers shows how one color can be manipulated to look like two, how two colors can be manipulated to look like one, and how a color can be made to look transparent depending on the colors they are surrounded by.
        
        Albers' Color Class
        
        The video explains Albers' color studies. One can see the colors changing colors right before their eyes.
        
        Oliver Sacks, "The Mind's Eye"
        
        Sacks describes how people who's eyes have failed them perceive visuality and visual culture. In his essay he presents accounts from vision impaired people. Two different versions are extracted: people who go into a state of "deep blindness", abandoning all visuality, and people who construct visual imagery representative of their surroundings in their heads. Sacks also notes the reliance on the other senses of the body to navigate the world and inform visual culture
        
        The brain is immediately connected to our sense of vision.
        
        Children see color differently
        
        Paul LaFarge, "Colors/Black"
        
        "We 'see' in total darkness because sight itself has a color, Aristotle suggests, and that color is black: the feedback hum that lets us know the machine is still on."
        Black is the color that we see when our eyes cannot pick up any light.
      - The Senses
        
        Touch
        
        James Turrell also stresses the materiality of light and describes seeing as eyes touching light.
      - The Brain
        
        Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, "The Color of Subjectivity"
        
        Daston and Galison examine how perceiving colors is extremely subjective: "[Whether] the sensation that I call red is the same as that which my neighbor calls red, we have no way of verifying." (275)
        They question if there is such a thing as the objectivitiy of mind, and come to the conclusion that seeing colors is inherently subjective.
        However, they not that linguistically colors can be used in a more objective sense: "Although color-blind people cannot distinguish between sensations of red and green, they can, Frege asserted, make the same linguistic distinctions that those with normal color vision do." (281)
        If the perception of color is inherently subjective, how does that affect the way we see visual culture?
    - - Light
        
        Lawrence Weschler, "LA Glows"
        
        Air
        
        "Light and air are really one element: indivisible, mutually interacting, thoroughly interpenetrated." (94)
        
        Weschler analyzes the quality of light in LA, its different variations and how it affects how we see the world around us.
        
        Pollution
        
        "there are all sorts of different sizes of particles floating in the air - from absolutely minuscule to relatively large and coarse [...]. Some of those - and especially the larger ones - simply get in the way of the line of vision between you and, say, that mountain over there. They blot out or defract beams of reflected sunlight emenating from the mountain that would otherwise be conveying detail to your eye. [...] We call it airlight." (94)
        
        The bright light in LA creates harsh and deep shadows, but on days of high airpolution, the haze can soften the light, creating no shadows in bright light: "Shadows and no Shadows - that's th duality of L.A. light, isn't it? And how apporpriate for a place where the sun rises in the desert and sets in the ocean." (90)
        
        Shadows
        
        Christopher Turner and Victor I. Stoichita, "A Short History of the Shadow: an Interview with Victor I. Stoichita"
        
        Stoichita reviews the history of the shadow and its significance in shaping visual culture. He reflects on the notion of materiality of the shadow - as in reality shadows are inherently immaterial and only show the materiality of a thing. Children only learn to see and understand their own shadow at age 8-9. Stoichita also reflects on how shadows were used for creating portraits of people in the ealry ages of staging. The importance of shadows in creating visual media and culture can be seen in the use of light and shadows in photography - or as William Henry Fox Talbot calls it: "shadowgraphy".
        
        Stoichita rejects the sardistic nature of:
        
        Stoichita rejects the sardistic nature of:
        
        Metaphors of Shadow: Stoichita: "the Greeks, the shadow was one of the metaphors for the psyche, the soul". Andersen's short story manifests this metaphor
      - James Turrell, You Who Look
        
        James Turrell uses the surroundings to change the way we see color and light. He builds a light exhibition inside a crator and, thereby, uses nature to shape light. Turrell also stresses the materiality of light
      - The Weather
        
        Joan Didion, "Los Angeles Notebook"
        
        Didion describes how the weather, light, and airquality affect people's health and behavior: "Whenever and wherever a foehn blows, doctors hear about headaches and nausea and allergies, about 'nervousness' and 'depression.'" (163)
- - - - Gender
        
        Woman
        
        Joseph von Sternberg, Blonde Venus
        
        In the movie, Helen rises and falls in different roles, most of which are gendered. As a wife she fails when she has an affair with another man while her husband is away at radiation therapy. She succeeds as a performer in cabaret, but has to interrupt her career to take care of her son, whom she has taken away from her husband. During this time she hides from her husband and works as a prostitute. In the end she reconciles with her husband and appears as a cabaret star. Blonde Venus portrays the different roles women may take on/have to take on due to social dynamics and shows their arbitrary nature by switching between them throughout the movie. At the same time, Blonde Venus performs racial stereotypes of blackness through blackfacing, showing the cultural value of feminine whiteness.
        
        feminine whiteness
        
        feminine whiteness
        
        feminine whiteness
        
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        Hilaria Loyo, "Blinding Blondes
        
        "Dietrich's racial masquerade (blackface and whiteface) not only exposes the constructedness of white women as symbols of whiteness, disclaiming their natural essence, but also juxtaposes moral values that were culturally conceived incompatible in the thirties." (184)
        "the presence of blackness not only renders white blindingly visible, but the black/white polarity in Dietrich also brings out specific sexual, moral, class, and racial meanings in US culture, where racial discourses and images have always merged with sexual ideology to construct a sense of national identity." (186)
        "So, the blinding blonde connotes both the purity associated with whiteness and the sexual activity traditionally associated with blackness in a juxtaposition such that even when in the absence of the black element, the intense white brightness makes its absence conspicious." (186)
        Loyo highlights how notions of femininity are deeply connected to race, class, and sexuality.
        
        examines Dietrich's portrayal of a blindingly blonde woman
        
        connects gender with sexuality
        
        Andrew Dosunmu, Andrew Bradford, Mother of George
        
        In this family drama, a Nigerian married couple in the U.S. is trying to have a child. After failed attempts and visits to fertility doctors, the wife Adenike is pressure to sleep with her husbands brother. When she becomes pregnant, she struggles to keep in the secret and tells her husband Ayodele that the baby isn't his. Ayodele has to decide if he wants to act as the child's father. The movie highlights how women are pressured to have babies and tend to be seen as the problem if there are fertility issues. For Adenike this pressure goes so far that she decides to cheat on her husband. Her role as a woman is inextricably intertwined with her role as a mother.
        
        Being invisible as a (black) immigrant in the US
        
        feminine blackness
        
        feminine blackness
        
        Krzysztov Kieslowski, Three Colors: Blue
        
        In the film, Julie loses her husband and her daughter in car accident. Over the course of the film she mourns over her loss and in the end finds a sort of closure. Throughout the film blue is used to represent her overwhelming sorrow. Blue encompasses the invisible pain of losing loved ones. Blue especially encompasses Julie's mourning for her child, as her daughter (as opposed to her husband) is almost never cinematically represente in the film. Instead, blue takes on the loss of her daughter, which is all encompassing. Julie's role as a wife becomes secondary to her role as a mother, the pain cuts deeper, so deep that it can only be represented by the blue. The film also presents other female identities/roles, such as the prostitute. Julie's relationship with her neighbor turns queer, challenging heteronormative structures surrouning the female body.
        
        challenging heteronormativity
        
        Motherhood
        
        Carol Mavor, "A Blue Lollipop"
        
        Mavor analyzes how Three Colors: Blue portrays a mother's mourning for a lost daughter, as symbolized by the blue lollipop.
        "But what happens when the child no longer is a mouth for the mother to feed, when the child no longer presents her with the empty mouth for her to coax words out of, to turn her now gone milk into speech? Julie remedies this oral vacancy left by Anna by eating her child. Julie eats the child as food, swallows her whole in order to entomb her." (135-136)
        As Mavor's analysis of the blue lollipop shows, the experience of a mother losing her child is unique, because it is inextricably connected to the experiences of motherhood and pregnancy. It cannot be compared to losing a partner or a father losing a child.
      - Race
        
        White
        
        David Batchelor, "Whitescapes"
        
        In this chapter, David Batchelor exposes how the concept of whiteness as it is used in Western art and visual culture reflects racist notions of purity and elitism. He criticizes minimalism for its "careless association with whiteness" (12) and Melville's great white whale as "a monstrous corruption of the great Western ideal of the classical body."(17) By portraying whiteness as purity, non-whiteness is portrayed as dirty. The cultural norm of whiteness leaves no room: "No smells, no noises, no colour; no changing from one state to another and the uncertainty that comes with it; no exchanges with the outside world and the doubt and the dirt that goes with that; no eating, no drinking, no pissing, no shitting, no sucking, no fucking, no nothing." (19)
        
        Le Corbussier, "A Coat of Whitewash: The Law of Ripolin"
        
        (see also As shaped by the material world >Tools/Technology > Paint)
        By proposing to cover the world in white paint, Corbusier exhibits social values of whiteness that also inform race: "to love purity!" (82) The notions of purity and productivity Corbusier associates with whiteness reflect a social understanding of racial whiteness.
        
        metaphors of moral racial whiteness
        
        Richard Dyer, "White"
        
        "Power in contemporary society habitually passes itself off as embodied in the normal as opposed to the superior." (458)
        "In the realm of categories , black is always marked as a colour (as the term 'colored' egregiously acknowledges), and is always particularising; whereas white is not anything really, not and identity, not a particularising quality, because it is everything - white is no colour because it is all colours." (458)
        Richard Dyer highlights, how whiteness in visual media is invisible, while non-whiteness is always particularised and othered. He urges to make whiteness visible in visual culture.
        
        norm of whiteness
        
        norms of whiteness
        
        norm of whiteness
        
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        David Batchelor, "Chromophobia
        
        Batchelor examines how color has been purged from Western visual culture.He titles this fear of color "chromophobia": "Chromophobia manifests itself in the many and varied attempts to purge colour from culture, to devalue colour, to diminish its significance, to deny its complexity." (22)
        Batchelor exposes how this purging is connected to a rejection of non-white, feminine, lower-class, and queer identities: "colour is made out to be the property of some 'foreign' body - usually the feminine, the oriental, the primitive, the infantile, the vulgar, the queer or the pathological." (23)
        Batchelor then goes on a historical journey where he details how color has been treated in visual culture. What this chapter indicates is how oppressive forces - such as sexism, racism, classism, and queerphobia - have seeped into visual culture.
        
        criticizes
        
        Black
        
        Claudia Rankine, Citizen
        
        Introduces the concept of
        
        Invisibility
        
        Claudia Rankine provides vignettes of everyday experiences as a Black woman in America. She highlights systemic and cultural racism that is otherwise invisible in society. Rankine exposes how Black people in society are rendered either invisible or hypervisible. It is their addressablility that makes them attackable.
        
        Introduces the concept of
        
        Franz Fanon, "The Fact of Blackness
        
        Hypervisibility
        
        whiteness makes everything else:
        
        Being addressable
        
        Fanon examines what it means to be addressible. He recounts a moment he was shouted at by a white perso and called the N-word. Through the exclamation his body and his self is turned hypervisible. At the same time, he experiences what W.E.B. DuBois calls Double Consciousness, as he constructs an identity that is determined by the eyes of the white man. "the black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of white man" as his black identity only exists in relation to whiteness (257). His identity in society is reduced to his skin color, and this is what society sees: "I was responsible at the same time for my body, for my race, for my ancestors." (259)
        
        being addressable
        
        being addressable
        
        Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
        
        "I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me" (3). In the story, a Black retells his experiences of living in a white world that refuses to see him. He finds refuge in a basement of an all-white apartment complex which he has filled with hundreds of lightbulbs powered with stolen electricity. By illuminating his form, Ellison's main character takes controll over his existence.
        
        Jared Sexton, "All Black Everything"
        
        “It is evident that #BlackLivesMatter and the organizations that coalesce the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) represent the most important and promising developments in the theory and practice of abolition.” Sexton examines the social movement of Black Lives Matter (BLM) and its significance in contemporary society. What Sexton highlights is the use of visual culture as a form of protest: "a vast digital image archive, a prolific online social-media commentary, and a rich analog protest culture involving political signage, graffiti, fashion, and dance, among other things."
        
        BLM protest
        
        BLM Protest
        
        BLM Protest
        
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        Dawoud Bey, "Night Coming Tenderly, Black"
        
        (see full description under As shaped by the material world >Tools/Technology > Camera)
        Bey reimagines stations of the Underground Railroad through black and white photography. Thereby, he visualizes not only safe spaces that are largely lost today, but also a history of Black oppression that is invisible to the eye.
        
        Shawn Michelle Smith, "Photography, Darkness, and the Underground Railroad: Dawoud Bey's Night coming Tenderly, Black"
        
        Smith reflects on Dawoud Bey's photographic series "Night Coming Tenderly, Black" She analyzes how the pictures fit into the historical context of photography during slavery. She reviews how Abolitionists used photography to help their cause. For example, Harriet Tubman used pictures of fellow workers of the Underground Railroad toused photographs to identify abolitionists of U.R.Another instance is Sojourner Truth copywriting her own portraiture. Thereby, Smith highlights how photography can be used against oppressive racial forces.
        
        threat of photopgraphy
        
        Lorna Simpson, Darkening
        
        Lorna Simpson's Darkening is a series of large scale paintings of glaciers painted over in inky blue paint. Simpson collaged images of glaciers over article cut-outs of Black women, then covered the printed collage in blue ink. These women hidden behind the iceberg peak out to the viewer through the blue. Forcibly placed into a hostile icy environment, their bodies expose racist notions connected to the whiteness of the arctic. At the same time, they remind us of the racist systems and social dynamics that transform the US into a hostile environment.
        
        Robin Coste Lewis, "Using Black to Paint Light"
        
        "The unanticipated shock: so much believed to be white is actually—strikingly—blue. Endless blueness. White is blue. An ocean wave freezes in place. Blue. Whole glaciers, large as Ohio, floating masses of static water. All of them pale frosted azuls. It makes me wonder—yet again—was there ever such a thing as whiteness? I am beginning to grow suspicious. An open window.
        I am blue.
        I am a frozen blue ocean
        I am a wave struck cold in mid air.
        The wave is nude beneath her blue dress.
        Her skin is blue."
        Robin Coste Lewis uses the arctic environment to highlight spaces of racial hostility and the contructedness of race ("so much believed to be white is actually blue") . She stresses the instability of darkness as both dangerous (reflected in her fall leading to a traumatic brain injury) but also soothing and beautiful. Referencing Matthew Hansen, she places the black body in a climate of anti-blackness that weathers the black body. While blue is represented as a color of hostility (in the ice), it is also ingrained with hope and healing: "Here is how we all learned to walk properly again. Underwater. Blue." ...
        "We could watch the light turning the room every color."
        
        Seph Rodney, "Lorna Simpson Searches for Meaning in the Arctic Ice"
        
        "And then interlaced with the ice and seawater, are thin, vertical strips of script spelling out bits and pieces of speech such as: “hit,” “act,” “out,” “lab,” “con.” The fragments are like a stammering or murmuring of sense shaking itself loose from the maelstrom of object meeting abstraction, of documents of exploration meeting painterly inference — all this stirring in the arctic ice."
        Rodney stresses how language "pulls her [the Black woman's] body into politics, saga, elegy, and poetry." In Simpson's paintings, however, "language fades out like a radio signal slowly being lost."
        Therefore, Rodney analyzes how Black people's experience is often overlooked. Simpson makes this "radio silence" visible.
        
        Radion Silence
        
        Radio silence
        
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      - Disability/Disease (Oppression of people based on their disability/disease
        
        Georgina Kleege, "Blindness and Visual Culture: An Eyewitness Account"
        
        Kleege calls out the assumption "that because the blind are immune to images, they must also be immune to the significance of the events and therefore somehow detached from, orindifferent to, the nation's collective horror and grief." (183)
        Instead she notes how eyewitness accounts from 9/11 "were strikingly non-visual." (183)
        
        Loss/Mourning
        
        Loss/Mourning
        
        It imagines a future where "blindness is a simple characteristic rather than an ominous mark of Otherness." (189)
        
        Envisioning Utopias of visual culture
        
        In the article, Kleege questions the way blindness has been portrayed and discussed in media and in the field of visual studies. She rejects the philosophical concept of "the Hypothetical Blind Man" (180) as it is used to falsely represent the experience of blindness.
        
        Georgina Kleege, "Molyneux Redux"
        
        In this essay, Georgina Kleege reenvisions the concept of "the Hypothetical Blind Man" by retelling the story in a realistic manner. Kleege, thereby, exposes the ableism inherent to the story and warns against the use of the problematic notion in academia and visual culture
        
        The Hypothetical Blind Man - A false representation of blindness in visual culture
        
        H.G. Wells, "The Country of the Blind"
        
        A short story about a seeing man who falls into a countr where everyone is blind. There, society is contructed entirely around blindness and the concept of visuality has been completely erased from the understanding of life. The story both represents how ingrained visuality is in our society, while also imagining a society where this is not the case.
        
        Derek Jarman, "Into the Blue"
        
        In the chapter, Jarman describes the experience of living/dying with HIV, the loss of his friends to HIV, and the loss of his vision. He uses the color blue to represent the endless expanse, his disease, his loss of vision, and death. As the last color, blue represents that which remains: in live and in death and at the edge of vision.Jarman thereby tries to encompass an inexplicable experience of living in the context of an invisible disease.
        
        Derek Jarman, Blue
        
        The film uses the text of his chapter "Into the Blue". The text is used as a voice over while a blue image playes on screen; an endless blue expanse that shocks the viewer who is used to the moving image. Jarman's Blue refuses to sentimentalize the suffering of dying of HIV. Instead it forces onto the viewer Yves Klein's Ultramarine Monochrome. The color encompasses his experience as a gay man suffering from HIV. Blue represents the last color; thereby, it encompasses his loss of vision and his loss of his friends. Jarman's blue is steeped in layers of death that is part of the experience of living as a gay man in the America of the 80s and 90s (and also today).
        
        Photos of gay men with AIDS
        
        The Virus
      - Sexuality
        
        Homosexuality
        
        homosexualty
    - - Plato, "The Allegory of the Cave"
        
        The Allegory of the Cave describes a scenario where a group of people who are chained inside a cave and cannot move their heads. Another group of people stands behind them and projects images on the wall infront of the prisoners, which the prisoners name. One of the prisoners is able to break free and takes on the difficult journey outside the cave. Upon emerging, he is blinded by the light, but soon learns to see the real world. He comes back to the cave to educate the other prisoners but they reject him and kill him for his different world view. The Cave represents a political system where those in power are the ones that can manipulate the images others see. Additionally, people turning away from the knowledge system set in place face political danger.
      - H.G. Wells, "The Country of the Blind"
        
        (See full description under Reflecting Systems > Social Systems >Disability/Disease)
        Well's short story can also be seen as an allegory for the oppressive nature of imperialism; or the physical dangers of assimilation to a system one does not fit into.
      - Paul LaFarge,"Colors/Black"
        
        (see also As shaped by the material world > the body > eyes)
        Paul LaFarge examines black as a color of refusal and protest:
        " Because we are capable of inaction, we know that we have the ability to act, and also the choice of whether to act or not. Black, the color of not seeing, not doing, is in that sense the color of freedom."
        Black gives the opportunity to protest political systems that oppress people.
      - Michel Foucault, "Panopticism"
        
        In this chapter, Foucault analyzes Bentham's panopticum, an architectural construct with a central tower that observes the individual partitions built in a circle around it. The people in the cells are completely isolated from each other and cannot see the person in the watch tower. However, the observer in the tower is able to see them.Therefore, the prisoners never know if they are being watched, but are always hypervisible. As Foucault says, in the panopticum "[v]isibility is a trap." (200) The constant fear of being watched creates a correctional mechanism for the behavior of the prisoners. Foucault makes the point that this concept is not merely architectural, but deeply ingrained in modern day society. The political and social institutions set in place (specifically norms) function to order society. The fact that our behavior is seen by other people is what functions as a correctional measure that keeps people within the societal bounds. First and foremost, this societal surveillance is not inherently bad, but is necessary to structure society. However, the instituted systems can be used to oppress people society deems as non-conforming on the basis of religion, beliefs, skin color, gender, sexuality, etc. What is more, through modern technology, social surveillance penetrates deeper and deeper into private lives, raising questions about data security and privacy laws.
        
        hypervisible
      - Monty Python, "How Not to be Seen"
        
        This educational Monty Python sketch teaches the viewer how not to be seen. It presents multiple people who are hiding in various locations. If they are seen, they are shot dead. However, an overimposing narrator turns to kill everyone who is hiding by eliminating possible hiding spots (via explosions). To me this video satirically highlights how overimposing surveillance systems can turn deadly. The narrator seems to have an ability to always know where people are, and if not he eliminates all possible chances. Moreover, the video shows how oppressive political systems assert control over their population: through threats of life not only to the individual but also their friends and family (who are also killed if a person can't be found). Therefore, the video establishes a surveillance system where being in the frame of the camera means death.
        
        Camera as an object of surveillance
        
        camera as an object of surveillance
        
        Invisibility
      - Sophie Calle, Suite Venitienne (1981)
        
        In her piece, Sohpie Calle follows a man from Paris to Venice, trying to follow in his steps. She captures moments and places where he has passed and takes pictures of him in private moments. Unlike Acconci, she invades privade spaces with her camera and travels over large distances. Calle's piece shows how the camera functions as a on object of surveillance that is dependent on the person using it., as Calle is the one operating the camera. Therefore, Calle's disturbing art project shows how systems of surveillance are constructed by humans and cannot be seen as seperate from their politcal context. What is more, Calle shows how systems of surveillance employ not only technology but other people as surveillers (as Calle asked neighbors to help her take pictures of the man).
      - Trinh Minh-Ha, "The Image and the Void"
        
        Trinh Minh-Ha examines how visual culture happens in the margins. Minh-Ha shows how images or their absence can funtion as an act of rebellion against political oppression. As Minh-Ha explains, censorship of images can show the power of these images. Therefore, their absence acts as political resistance
        
        invisibility
        
        Invisibility
- - - - Blumenberg analyzes the different metaphors of light in connection to truth seeking in different Western cultures in a historical perspective. What he finds is that cultural practices of light are imbued in our language that change the way we see light
      - One of these metaphors is:
    - - (see full description under Reflecting Systems > Social Systems > Intersectionality > Disability) Kleege notes how visual culture is ingrained in our language. As she writes, "the more one knows about language, the harder it is to find vocabulary which does not have some root in sighted or hearign experience." (185)
    - - Andersen's short story about a man who's shadow becomes material and steals his life, exemplifies how visual culture is informed by the image of the shadow. In the story, a man travels to the global south and loses his shadow. The shadow jouneys back to his owner, but on his way gains materiality and takes on a life of his own. The only thing the shadow is missing from being fully human is a shadow of his own. He convinces his previous owner to act as his shadow. When his owner rebells, the shadow executes him.
    - - Melville explains the significance of the whiteness of the whale in his literature. He reviews cultural metaphors associated with whiteness, such as power and superiority. However, he states that whiteness in combination with something evil "heightens that terror to the fullest." (38)
    - - Popova presents the color wheel by Goethe, who distinguishes 8 different colors: yellow, red-yellow, yellow-red, blue, red-blue, blue-red, red, and green. Goethe then describes these colors, through which he reflects the metaphors associated with these colors. The cross-cultural similarities (German to US-American) and the historical parallels to today's metaphors associated with these colors shows how imbeded these metaphors are in our culture: They are cultural pillars.
    - - (See full description under As shaped by the Material World > The body > The Brain)
        While color itself is subjective, Daston and Galison note that linguistically colors can be used in a more objective sense: "Although color-blind people cannot distinguish between sensations of red and green, they can, Frege asserted, make the same linguistic distinctions that those with normal color vision do." (281) Therefore, our linguistic understanding of colors is collectively upheld
    - - Walter Benjamin explains how children see color differently: "For them color is fluid, the medium of all changes, and not a symptom." (50). This intrinsic connection of children and colorfullness is reflected in the way we talk about color. Often colors are connected to metaphors of childishness and innocence in visual media language. By confining color to the world of the child, black and white are presented as sophisticated.
      - connotations of color
        
        Connotations of color
        
        Connotations of color
        
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    - - Yves Klein talks about a war between the line and color that has impacted the art community for centuries. As he states, in recent history the line has taken on the form of the word, while color is left to take over the artworld.Through the essay, Klein exhibits the different connotations and metaphors associated with colors, and more specifically with the color bllue: "Blue has no dimensions, it is beyond dimensions, [...] blue suggests at most the sea and sky, and they, after all, are in actual, visible nature what is most abstract." (122)