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Seeing Visual Culture visual culture has the ability to portray..., , -…

- - - - David Batchelor, “Whitescapes,” in Chromophobia
        
        “The uninterruptable, endless emptiness of this house was impressive, elegant and glamorous in a spare and reductive kind of way, but it was also assertive, emphatic and ostentatious. This was assertive silence, emphatic blankness, the kind of ostentatious emptiness that only the very wealthy and the utterly sophisticated can afford. It was a strategic emptiness, but it was also accusatory”
      - David Batchelor, “Chromophobia,” in Chromophobia
        
        Batchelor explains how colors are purged in society through making them out to be representative of the feminine, the non-western, the primitive, the childish etc. Deeming color superficial, non-essential or trivial further allows for visual exclusion through limiting the use of color.
      - If anything with color were to be placed in this room it would immediately be spotted. Color is not included in this space.
  - - - Hilaria Loyo, “Blinding Blondes: Whiteness, Femininity, and Stardom”
        
        “This notion flaunts the dichotomy of surface/depth, mask/essence, for the masquerade mimics a constructed identity to conceal the absence of a real or essential feminine identity - to conceal that there is nothing behind the mask, that the mask is the essence.”
      - Syreeta McFadden, “Teaching the camera to see my skin”
        
        "The image is used as a metric for skin-color balance, which technicians use to render an image as close as possible to what the human eye recognizes as normal. But there's the rub: With a white body as a light meter, all other skin tones become deviations from the norm."
      - Richard Dyer, “White,”
        
        "White is not anything really, not an identity, not a particularizing quality, because it is everything - white is no color because it is all colors. This property of whiteness, to be everything and nothing, is the source of its representational power…white domination is reproduced by the way that white people ‘colonize the definition of normal.'"
      - Colonial White
        
        These images depict Colonial White, exclusionary whiteness best recognized in contrast with non-whiteness.
  - - - Blonde Venus (dir. Joseph von Sternberg, 1932)
        
        The Blonde Venus is able to both place emphasis on her whiteness and capitalize on appropriation on her journey to stardom. Through playing these characters she is contributing to the exclusion of non-white bodies.
      - Hilaria Loyo, “Blinding Blondes: Whiteness, Femininity, and Stardom”
        
        “This notion flaunts the dichotomy of surface/depth, mask/essence, for the masquerade mimics a constructed identity to conceal the absence of a real or essential feminine identity - to conceal that there is nothing behind the mask, that the mask is the essence.” Masquerading, or playing a character to emphasize the whiteness of femininity of already white characters contributes to exclusion of non-white people.
  - - - 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.' One sees black and black alone, or one sees everything else without it, we might even say against it. To see black at all is to see all black everything."
      - Three Shades of Black
        
        Pure Blackness only exists in the exclusion of all light.
  - - - Mother of George (Andrew Dosunmu, 2014, Bradford Young, Director of Photography)
        
        Mother of George’s use of literal exclusion through framing, as seen above, often prevents the audience from seeing the characters as a whole, especially Adenike, signifying her struggle with her identity, as a woman, as a wife, and with her culture.
      - Hito Steyerl, How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File
        
        Exclusion through framing: removing something from the frame of the camera, or moving so close up that the camera can’t make out what the object is, is a way to prevent visibility and prevent oneself from becoming a target.
  - - - Props used in the film Blonde Venus, especially in the "Hot Voodoo" Scene with the use of the gorilla suit, wigs, and instruments, work further to contribute to the exclusion of non-white bodies in the film.
- - - - Oliver Sacks, “The Mind’s Eye: What the blind see,” The New Yorker (2003)
        
        “Imagination dissolves and transforms, unifies and creates, while drawing upon the "lower" powers of memory and association. It is by such imagination, such "vision," that we create or construct our individual worlds.”
      - Paul LaFarge, “Colors/Black,” Cabinet Magazine 36 (2009-2010)
        
        "You can sit in the darkness for as long as you like, staring blindly at nothing, and see what you will. Maybe that’s the reason why caves, which are the Fort Knox of blackness, were the first sacred places. In the total darkness of caves, human beings rubbed their eyes until they saw weird patterns in the dark: gods, they thought."
      - Blue (Derek Jarman, 1993)
        
        The monochrome blue screen in Jarman's Blue gives way for imagination of the images and story told in the film's voiceover
      - Derek Jarman, “Into the Blue,” from Chroma: A Book of Color
        
        “Image, although you know the task is to fill the empty page. From the bottom of your heart, pray to be released from image. Time is what keeps the light from reaching us. The image is a prison of the soul, your heredity, your education, your vices and aspirations, your qualities, your psychological world. I have walked behind the sky. For what are you seeking? The fathomless blue of Bliss”
  - - - Lawrence Weschler, “LA Glows,” The New Yorker, Feb. 23, 1998.
        
        “‘One of its most common features, however’ he suggested, ‘is the haze that fractures the light, scattering it in such a way that on many days the world almost has no shadows. Broad daylight-- and, in fact, lots and lots of light-- and no shadows. Really peculiar, almost dreamlike…’”
  - - - Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, “The Color of Subjectivity,”
        
        “It can be roughly summarized as the distinction between what the world is really like and our perceptions of the world. We humans infer that objects in the world are yellow or red or green because we see them as such, but in reality the colors are phantasms created by interaction of our perceptual apparatuses with certain kinds of particles of different shapes and speeds.”
      - In Lecture: James Turrell, You Who Look
        
        "The eyes will create form even when it's not there"
        "If I change your circumstance or your context of vision I can change the color of the sky"
      - Joseph Albers, excerpts from Interaction of Color (1963)
        
        Interaction of Color depicts how changing a backdrop or changing the placement of colors can manipulate our perceptions, leading us to believe we are seeing two colors when we are only seeing one in reality. The subjective nature of color can cause us to see a world separate from reality.
  - - - Stanley Cavell, “The World as a Whole: Color”
        
        “These films discovered that color can serve to unify the projected world in another way than by direct reliance upon, or implication toward, the spatial-temporal consistency of the real world. The world unified is obviously not the real past world of photography, but a consistent region of make-believe,”
      - The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, George Cukor, 1939)
        
        The world of the Wizard of Oz is almost absurdly vivid and consistently colorful, making it instantly recognizable as other-worldly, or as fantastical. The bright reds and greens in the film depict magical objects while any non-magical objects are dull in comparison.
      - Walter Benjamin, “A Child’s View of Color”
        
        “But children also elevate it to a spiritual level because they perceive objects according to their color content and hence do not isolate them, instead using them as a basis from which to create the interrelated totality of the world of the imagination. The imagination can be developed only by contemplating colors and dealing with them in this fashion,”
      - Black Panther
        
        The heavily saturated colors in Black Panther's color palette help create fantastical world.
  - - - Yves Klein, “The Evolution of Art towards the Immaterial”
        
        “In the realm of the blue air more than anywhere else one feel that the world is accessible to the most unlimited reverie. It is then that a reverie assumes true depth. The blue sky yawns beneath the dreams, the dream escapes from the two-dimensional image; soon in a paradoxical way the airborne dream exists only in depth, while the two other dimensions, in which picturesque and painted reverie are entertained, lose all visionary interest.”
      - Robin Coste Lewis, Using Black to Paint Light: Walking Through a Matisse Exhibit Thinking about the Arctic and Matthew Henson
        
        "A recurring dream. When my bed becomes a vast field of frozen ice the color of indigo, and I cannot move, I begin to see her face."
- - - - Georgina Kleege, “Blindness and Visual Culture: An Eyewitness Account,”
        
        “The visual studies scholar, highly skilled in understanding images, who loses some or even all of her sight, will not lose the ability to analyze images and to communicate her observations. Professor Mitchell’s classroom exercise, ‘Showing Seeing’, assumes that some students will be better at the task, while others might improve their performance with practice, and in all cases their aptitude would have little (if anything) to do with their visual acuity."
      - H.G. Wells, “The Country of the Blind”
        
        H.G. Wells’ “Country of the Blind” explains the story of a sighted man who happens upon an enclosed community of blind people who have no concept of sight. When he tries to explain to them what sight is and that he can see, the deem him delusional, and he is unable to exist as efficiently and as content as the rest of the community who take no issue with their lack of sight, showing again how a lack of vision isn’t necessary for understanding life.
      - Georgina Kleege, “Molyneaux Redux,”
        
        Georgina Kleege's “Molyneux Redux,” details the story of a blind woman whose sight is restored and then studied by doctors. However, for the woman, the restoration of her sight is more of a burden than it is a miracle, as the doctors believe, and she is unable to exist in her daily life as easily and as happily as before she was sighted, showing how vision isn’t necessary for understanding visual life and culture.
  - - - Lorna Simpson, Darkening (2019)
        
        Lorna Simpson takes previously recognizable, understandable images and manipulates them in a way that makes them abstract. By superimposing them it manipulates our perspective, making the images unclear.
      - Seph Rodney, Lorna Simpson Searches for Meaning in the Arctic Ice
        
        "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."
      - Plato, The Allegory of the Cave from The Republic, Book VII
        
        "It isn't the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education takes forgranted that sight is there but that it isn't turned the right way or looking whereit ought to look, and it tries to redirect it appropriately."
        The prisoners were incapable of viewing reality itself, only an abstracted version made of shadows and were unable to see the light.
  - - - Christopher Turner and Victor I. Stoichita, “A Short History of the Shadow: an Interview with Victor I. Stoichita,”
        
        “To represent a cast shadow correctly signifies a good knowledge of perspective, of three-dimensional space... it was too difficult to recognize himself or his own double, his own projection, in the black spot. The ability to recognize one’s own shadow is actually a very difficult process, one that is only mastered at the age of eight or nine.”
      - Plato, The Allegory of the Cave from The Republic, Book VII
        
        “Then the prisoners would in every way believe that the truth is nothing other than the shadows of those artifacts...I suppose, then, that he'd need time to get adjusted before he could see things in the world above. At first, he'd see shadows most easily, then images of men and other things in water, then the things themselves. Of these, he'd be able to study the things in the sky and the sky itself more easily at night, looking at the light of the stars and the moon, than during the day, looking at the sun and the light of the sun.”
  - - - Hans Christian Andersen, "The Shadow"
        
        The man in Hans Christian Andersen's "The Shadow" fails to acknowledge the truth of his shadow self, or his own flaws, until they ultimately overcome him, leading to his demise, as his shadow-self then plays the character of the man.
      - Ingmar Bergman, Persona (1966)
        
        Ingmar Bergman's Persona blurs the lines (often literally) of what we can truthfully know about either of the women through the playing of characters. The film shows how we can only know so much about another person, which is what they choose to reveal; a persona is a version of oneself as viewed by others.
  - - - Le Corbussier, “A Coat of Whitewash: The Law of Ripolin,”
        
        “If the house is all white, the outline of things stands out from it without any possibility of mistake; their volume shows clearly; their color is distinct. The white of whitewash is absolute, everything stands out from it and is recorded absolutely, black on white; it is honest and dependable. Put anything dishonest or in bad taste - it hits you in the eye. It is rather like an X-ray of beauty. It is a court of assize in permanent session. It is the eye of truth.” Whitewash allows for ultimate contrast, it is honest, truthful, forthcoming. Placing any object against a whitewashed wall makes it unmistakeable, contrast in visual culture is purposeful, signifying knowledge, what is clearly known and indisputable.
      - Robert Rauschenberg, White Paintings (1951)
        
        "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."
      - "This done, it is placed in the sunshine for a few minutes, until the exposed parts of the paper have turned dark brown or nearly black. It is then removed to a shady place, and when the leaf is taken up, it is found to have left its impression or picture on the paper."
  - - - Similar to white's roll in contrast, white can show true texture of an object, allows you to see the whole truth of the piece.
    - - Black square is more than just a black square due to its visible texture.
  - - - Three Colors: Blue (Krzysztov Kieslowski, 1993)
        
        In this scene, Julie eats the blue candy, which is representative of the memory of her daughter.
      - Carol Mavor, excerpt from Blue Mythologies (Duke University Press, 2012)
        
        “From blue to blue. Such crystals of nucleic blue beauty, blue pain, blue memory, blue forgetting, blue childhood, blue old age, blue loss, blue sex, blue candy, blue music are ‘fragments of the truth which attract to themselves, like a magnet, an inkling of the unkown”
- - - - Claudia Rankine, excerpt from Citizen (2014)
        
        “When a woman you work with calls you by the name of another woman you work with, it is too much of a cliche not to laugh out loud with the friend beside you who says, oh no she didn’t. Still, in the end, so what, who cares? She had a fifty-fifty chance of getting it right. Yes and in your mail apology note appears referring to ‘our mistake.’ Apparently your own invisibility is the real problem causing her confusion. This is how the apparatus she propels you into begins to multiply its meaning”
      - Ralph Ellison, excerpt from Invisible Man (1952)
        
        “That invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come in contact. A matter of the construction of their inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality. I am not complaining, nor am I protesting either. It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.”
  - - - Franz Fanon, “The Fact of Blackness,”
        
        “A feeling of inferiority? No, a feeling of nonexistence. Sin is Negro as virtue is white. All those white men in a group, guns in their hands, cannot be wrong. I am guilty. I do not know of what, but I know that I am no good.”
      - Monty Python, “How Not to be Seen,” 1971
        
        Monty Python: “How not to be seen,” portrays how making yourself seen, or allowing yourself to become seen, can give power to others by making yourself a target.
  - - - Trinh Minh-Ha, “The Image and the Void,”
        
        “While, like a beast, the humongous wave ravages everything in its course, one catches a glimpse, at the margins of the frame, of the nearby traffic still rolling unknowingly as if nothing is happening”
  - - - Michel Foucault, “Panopticism”
        
        ”Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action,”
      - Trevor Paglen, “Invisible Images (Your Pictures Are Looking at You)”
        
        “The invisible world of images isn’t simply an alternative taxonomy of visuality. It is an active, cunning, exercise of power, one ideally suited to molecular police and market operations–one designed to insert its tendrils into ever-smaller slices of everyday life...Despite the ‘objectivity’ of the overall system, it unambiguously serves powerful government and corporate interests at the expense of vulnerable populations and civic life.”
      - Vito Acconci, Following Piece (1979)
        
        These images from Following Piece show Acconci following strangers, giving him power to surveil them and know about their daily lives without their knowing.
      - Sophie Calle, Suite Vénitienne (1981)
        
        These images show the man Calle followed without his knowing.
  - - - Hans Blumenberg, “Light as Metaphor for Truth: At the Preliminary Stage of Philosophical Concept Formation,”
        
        “Light is intrusive; in its abundance, it creates the overwhelming, conspicuous clarity with which the truth ‘comes forth’; if forcibly acquires the irrevocability of Spirit’s consent. Light Remains What It Is while letting the infinite participate in it; it is consumption without loss. Light produces space, distance, orientation, calm contemplation; it is the gift that makes no demands, the illumination capable of conquering without force.”
      - Herman Melville, “The Whiteness of the Whale,”
        
        Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows - a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink?
  - - - Shawn Michelle Smith, “Photography, Darkness, and the Underground Railroad: Dawoud Bey’s Night Coming Tenderly, Black,”
        
        "Bey’s images register darkness as the sheltering cover for runaways and their allies, and denote the relative absence of photographic traces as protection from surveillance. The dark images suggest that the usual lenses of photography provide an ill-fitting frame for this subject."
      - Dawoud Bey, “Night Coming Tenderly, Black” (2019)
        
        Power through protection is shown through overexposure which creates a blanket effect of darkness. This darkness serves as a layer of concealment.
  - - - Carrie Mae Weems, Colored People, Slow Fade to Black
        
        Weems portrays black adolescents in vibrant hues, using the colors to show differences and change the meaning of the term “Colored People” from one historically symbolizing oppression to one of power.
  - - - Maria Popova, 19th Century Insight into the Psychology of Color and Emotion, The Atlantic (2012)
        
        Visual culture has the power to induce and create emotion, exemplified by Goeth's account of the psychological effects of color. For example, blue, red-blue, and blue-red "produce a restless, susceptible, anxious impression," while yellow "carries with it the nature of brightness, and has a serene, gay, softly exciting character."
      - Johannes Itten, excerpts from The Art of Color (1920)
        
        “Thunder and lightning frighten us; but the colors of the rainbow and the northern lights soothe and elevate the soul. The rainbow is accounted a symbol of peace”
  - - - All light Everywhere (dir. Theo Anthony, 2021)
        
        All Light Everywhere shows how even something we might assume to be objective, such as technology, cameras, or surveillance can actually be quite subjective through manipulation. The images we might be told are objective, such as police body-cam footage, are actually constructed images, and therefore can’t always be relied on to show us the whole or exact truth.