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Seeing Visual Culture, Concept Map Key: Square nodes = topics Oval nodes…

- - - - Explores how technology is used to make things seen and unseen
      - Because the theme of not being seen is explored, the behavior changes into unique movements that would not normally be seen everyday
      - The level of absurdity in the video provides how contrasting social norms control the way we behave and when we let go of having society view us, we can act however we choose
  - - - Insists that we see race as a visible display
      - Links the main character to shine, celebrity, glow, shimmer
      - If you can put on "whiteness", you can put on "blackness"
        
        Destroys the idea of natural purity
        
        This movie, in today's social atmosphere, inappropriately uses blackface as a way to comment on race. Additionally, apeing (imitating an ape) is done by the main actress as she, a white woman, steps out from a removable black skin
        
        This movie demonstrates how race is performative
    - - The Minds Eye (Reading)
        
        Using visual practices even as someone who is blind
        
        Torey: "soon became able to multiply four-figure numbers by each other, as on a blackboard, visualizing the whole operation in his mind."
        
        Hull: "did not use his potential for imagery in a deliberate way, lost it in two or three years"
      - InVisible Culture (Reading)
        
        "What if a man who was born blind but had learned to recognize through touch certain geometrical forms such as a sphere and a cube, were ot have his sight restored by an operation, would he then be able to recognize these forms through sight alone?"
    - - "The violence and unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate in its impermanence, its unreliability. The wind shows us how close to the edge we are."
      - Talks about the strange behavioral changes in response to the Santa Ana winds
  - - - Country of the Blind (Reading)
        
        Sight is invalidated, unimportant, and the members of their community find the sighted man to be idiotic for not being able to understand their practices and enhanced senses
        
        Through a completely blind society, community members established a way of life that is not sight dependent
      - Allegory of the Cave (Reading)
        
        Metaphor for suggesting that the view of our world is limited and wrong. The people in the cave had certain beliefs due to their limited knowledge of the world. To them, the cave and the shadows were their whole world until they were free to look to the light.
        
        Light becomes the source of knowledge
        
        "And at this point he would infer and conclude that the sun provides the seasons and the years, governs everything in the visible world, and is in some way the cause of all things that he used to see."
        
        The truth doesn't become known until knowledge and access to "the outside" is granted
        
        A Short History of the Shadow: an Interview with Victor I. Stoichita (Reading)
        
        "It seems to me that the philosopher was being blatantly sadistic. He has the perverse vision of a philosopher who enjoys the spectacle of ignorance as much as he enjoys the quest for knowledge."
  - - - Everyone interprets color and their connections to color in different ways. It would affect how someone feels and acts based on how they feel. Therefore, this text talks argues the subjective nature of color.
- - - - Dawoud Bey, Night Coming Tenderly, Black: Untitled #1, 2017
      - The photography series focused on the uncovering of the Underground Railroad, a significant piece of African-American history
        
        "The visual culture of the Underground Railroad is treacherous terrain, marked by threats of exposure, both literal and photographic, dangers carefully negotiated by those who traveled its routes."
        
        This topic is very difficult for researchers to gain information on due to a lack of historical evidence of it. Records were often burned and to keep the route a secret, remaining hidden from the control of white supremacy.
  - - - Introduction provides harsh lighting, disturbing scenes, unpredictability, shifting vantage, and confusion
        
        Explores the aspect of a person's character that is perceived by others
        
        Compares inner and outer appearance, emerging through two counterparts merging into one
        
        “I wonder whether your madness isn't the worst kind. You act healthy, act it so well that everyone believes you--everyone except me, because I know how rotten you are.”
  - - - "The princess and the shadow sstepped out on the balcony to show themselves, and to receive one cheer more. But the learned man heard nothing of all these festivities, for he had already been executed."
  - - - "The language that we speak, the literature that we read, the architecture that we inhabit, were all designed by and for the sighted."
    - - "'For others, the disaster may be becoming a thing of the past, but for us, it is still our reality today.'"
        
        Unless an important news topic is put into focus, everything is invisible
        
        Something that is relevant quickly becomes irrelevant once it is forgot about by the majority of society or when something new comes to take precedence in its place
  - - - Color has the ability to tell us information psychologically. It tells us crucial information about visual culture. When we have the ability to control something this powerful, it can be used as an advantage, becoming "ciphers for order and chaos"
- - - - Field of vision from camera is distorted and doesn't always show a full picture
  - - - "Visibility is a trap"
  - - - Racially being overlooked and overseen
        
        "our mistake"
        
        "Apparently your own invisibility is the real problem causing her confusion"
      - Hypervisibility and Invisibility
    - - "The world was entirely purged of colour."
      - "his mission was to strip bare and to make pure"
      - "There is a kind of white that repels everything that is inferior to it"
      - "world that didn't readily admit the existence of other worlds"
      - This work considers the connotations of today's society that encapsulates struggles of color association with evil and the talk of purity in association to whiteness.
    - - "Whitewash is extremely moral."
      - "There may be people who think against a background of black. But the tasks of our age - so strenuous, so full of danger, so violent, so victorious - seem to demand of us that we think against a background of white."
    - - "If the invisibility of whiteness colonises the definition of other norms—class, gender, heterosexuality, nationality and so on—it also masks whiteness as itself a category. White domination is then hard to grasp in terms of the characteristics and practices of white people"
      - White is always surrounded by class, ethnicity
        
        "Whiteness is never explicit"
      - Whiteness has no culture and is naturalized
      - Visibility of white bodies are not the same as black bodies
    - - "Race is also a contextual, socio-cultural concept that has traditionally served to justify forms of domination by classifying human beings into categories of superiority and inferiority."
      - Discusses the use of the generic blonde as the notable whiteness, folding under the means of generic treatment and social and cultural issues of the era
    - - "Black, then, begins and ends as a paradox or a problem of definition"
      - "When we read about black art by black artists, they seem always to refer, however indirectly, to black lives (and deaths), and to living (and dying), in relation to their black art.
      - "honor the lives and deaths of the most common and lowly"
        
        Kimberly M. Beacoat, Absence of Subjection, 2013
      - This article talks about the art coming from black artists and how their work relates to experiences and history of black culture
    - - "I was responsible at the same time for my body, for my race, for my ancestors."
      - The author describes experiences of alienation and struggling with the identity of the color of their skin
        
        feelings of being "trapped" by skin color
        
        "Inferiority comes into being through the other"
    - - "Photography is balancing an equation between light and documentary. Beauty and storytelling. Honesty and fantasy. The frame says how the photographer sees you."
      - "Lighting brown skin in the grayscale felt freeing."
        
        Color washed out facial features, changed important aspects of the photo and made the result undesirable in a way that it no longer captured reality
        
        Color distortion was largely due to the film industry making coloring films focused on white skin instead of looking at different colored skin as well
      - The creation of the photos due to the overall film industry was inherently racist
  - - - There's no justification for doing it, she doesn't remember why she does it in the first place
- - - - Three Colors: Blue (Film)
        
        Blue Lollipop (Reading)
        
        This reading discusses the representation of the color blue in a particular scene from the film Three Colors: Blue
        
        The lollipop being devoured by the now childless mother is a representation of swallowing grief and understanding that the sadness from the loss of a child is permanent
        
        The color representation in this film overflowed with the color blue. From the blue inked pen which corrected the musical composures, to the hanging blue mobile, blue represented a life from the past. Through the film feelings of pain, loss, and grief are explored.
      - Blue (Film)
        
        Into the Blue (Reading)
        
        This reading is just a transcript of the film, however, it is less enhanced because you don't get to hear the music that supplements the blue screen movie
        
        The purpose of the film was to make you uncomfortable, similarly to how the creator felt during his battle with AIDS.
        
        From the blue screen, there is an absence of something to focus on. There's a sense of lingering and waiting for the impending end
      - Darkening (Painting)
        
        This painting provides an overwhelming sense of blue. However, its entrancing nature has layers to it. Underneath the surface of blue, you can make out or interpret images of deep blue arctic scenes
        
        Lorna Simpson Search for Meaning in the Arctic Ice (Reading)
        
        "The fragments are like a stammering or murmuring of sense shaking itself loose from the maelstrom of object meeting abstraction"
        
        Simpson used liquid color and processes of layering to create Darkening. It's layers of water, ice, and nighttime capture the mystery of the icy arctic night
        
        The dark blue shows the movement from a solid black scene to a scene that's starting to get light into it. Blue is the onset of light from darkness
    - - Colors in the Wizard of Oz hold significance to the storyline. The color helps tell the story, especially the transition from sepia tones to technicolor when transitioning to the Land of Oz
        
        Examples of Color in the movie include: the Yellow Brick Road, the Emerald City, and the Magic Ruby Slippers
        
        In this film, red is not only associated with the ruby slippers, but also with senses of danger and evil. This is similar to the color green where there are both contrasts of good and evil with both colors
    - - Black
        
        Colors/Black (Reading)
        
        "Even when we are not seeing, it is by sight that we discriminate darkness from light, though not in the same way as we distinguish one colour from another."
        
        This reading describes the way we see black and darkness, and further discusses how they are interconnected
        
        "You can sit in the darkness for as long as you like, staring blindly at nothing, and see what you will."
      - White
        
        The Whiteness of the Whale (Reading)
        
        "in essence whiteness is not so much a colour as the visible absence of colour, and at the same time the concrete of all colours"
        
        White Painting (Paintings)
        
        White of the paintings accentuates the other attributes of the painting including shadows and light reflection.
        
        Untitled White Monochrome (Paintings)
        
        White imagery that leaves the audience trying to understand the purpose of the white painting.
    - - The photos take on a new meaning when using the term "Colored People". In these pictures, the people are actually in color, unnatural and filtered. It brings out colored people both as the color of their skin but also as the filtered color
    - - "Two or more colors are mutually harmonious if their mixture yields a neutral gray"
      - "Examples of harmonious tetrads are yellow/red-orange/violet/blue-green and hues of the harmonious rectangle are yellow-orange/red-violet/blue-violet/yellow-green"
      - Color theory dives further into how you can tell stories and portray emotions in an aesthetically pleasing way. Having colors that work well together can transform a visual piece.
    - - Cavell explores the use of color in film and photography in detail using specific examples of how the use of color changed the industry.
        
        "two films of the 1930s that really defined or declared color as such, used it to explore that possibility of film: The Wizard of Oz is the obvious case, exploiting such devices as magic ruby slippers, a yellow brick road..."
  - - - Invisible Man Prologue (Reading)
        
        "Now aware of my invisibility, I live rent-free in a building rented strictly to whites, in a section of the basement that was shut off and forgotten during the nineteenth century"
        
        Gordon Parks, Invisible Man Retreat, 1952
        
        Jeff Wall, After Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison,
        
        The use of lighting, both light and dark, accentuate the living situation of the Invisible Man, and how he is able to go unseen despite his purposeful bright presence
      - LA Glows (Reading)
        
        "Broad daylight—and, in fact, lots and lots of light—and no shadows. Really peculiar, almost dreamlike..."
        
        "air pollution on visibility"
        
        "I miss seasons, and I hate the way the light of the place throws you into such a trance that you fail to realize how time is passing."
        
        LA light is unique and transformative, causing emotional responses and new visual interpretations of lighting
      - You Who Look (Video)
        
        "When the eye has less light, it opens. It's not until the pupil opens that feeling comes out of the eyes as touch. Then you are really touching with light."
        
        "How our perception of seeing forms the sky."
        
        Perceptions of visual scenes change based on setting, lighting, and composition. The eyes create an image that you interpret based on what surrounds it.
      - Light as Metaphor for Truth (Reading)
        
        "light is not essentially the opposite of darkness; rather, in the essence of light, darkness is destroyed and overcome."
        
        light and dark have a "dualistic reliance" on each other
        
        "Light becomes a metaphor for "salvation," for immortality
        
        "With the emergence of the Enlightenment, "light" moves into the realm of that which is to be accomplished"
        
        Assumptions of light as the true reflect cultural practices of light (connecting to sight), changing the way we think
    - - Using Black to Paint Light (Reading)
        
        "Choose something dark. Choose a dark line to hang above you. If you want to see what light can do, always choose the dark."
      - Toward the Immaterial (Reading)
        
        "Blue is invisible becoming visible. Blue has no dimensions. It is beyond the dimensions of which other colors persist."
        
        Blue represents darkness and blackness with the coming of light
  - - - Blue and Yellow/Orange conflict
      - Use of blur, shine and shadow make characters stand out or fit in when it is desired
      - Characters are literally wrapped in color (scarves, other clothing)
    - - Photography shadows frame and change the dimension of the image.
      - Shadow hues discovered through changes in the environment/setting (lighting, weather), set up in a certain manner that allows for this observation
    - - Manipulation and composition of color to make it look a particular way
        
        "experience teaches that in visual perception there is a discrepancy between physical fact and psychic effect."
      - Make 2 colors look alike, make one color look like 2, make two colors look transparent
      - Color can shift the perspective, change the emotions of the viewer, and enhance the viewing experience depending on what colors you manipulate together