Please enable JavaScript.

Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.

Seeing Visual Culture - Coggle Diagram

- - - - “We suffer from the condition of being addressable.”
        (Citizen by Claudia Rankine)
        In a world with racist language, makes black bodies the problem and creates hypervisibility. This represents a visual system of oppression.
      - Blending in: In the Monty Python video, we could not see the people hiding at first, but when they stood up, we could and they were killed. Also, in "How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational MOV.File," this video poked fun at being seen/unseen, and made a statement about surveillance and its politics.
    - - "Black bodies accepted as menacing, lit in ways that cloak our features in shadows." (Teaching the Camera to See My Skin" by Syreeta McFadden) The appearance of black skin on film ranged in color and hue due to the use of Shirley cards. This reinforces whiteness as the norm and intersectional invisibility. For example, Carrie Mae Weems has worked to change this through her photography. #
      - “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.”
        (Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison)
        By being blind/ignorant toward others, we render them "invisible."
        “As long as the black man is among his own, he will have no occasion, except in minor internal conflicts, to experience his being through others.”
        ("The Fact of Blackness" by Franz Fanon)
        As Fanon put it, a black man is first black, after coming into the world as a black man. Shows how black bodies are for the other, and their identity is created through negation.
  - - - In Dawoud Bey's Night Coming Tenderly, Black, he took photographs of reimagined sites along the Underground Railroad.
      - "As Bey has said of the curated images, his aim was to “visualize black presence in the American physical and social landscape.”("Photography, Darkness, and the Underground Railroad: Dawoud Bey's Night Coming Tenderly, Black " by Shawn Michelle Smith
        Represents the threat of being seen during this period of time in history
    - - "To achieve this, it is at once too much and too little that the prisoner should be constantly observed by an inspector: too little, for what matters is that he knows himself to be observed; too much, because he has no need in fact of being so.” ("Panopticism" by Michael Foucalt)
        The overseer can see all, but the prisoners cannot. You can't ever be sure that you're being watched. This instability is important because being watched or under someone else's gaze affects behavior.
        Positioning is an important contributing aspect to the politics of being seen.
      - Positioning in the Following Piece by Vito Accondi By following someone on the street, he asserted his presence and put himself into a position of invisibility- ("I" is not I anymore). Similarly, in Suite Venitienne by Sophia Calle, she followed a man through Venice. She followed someone without their permission or knowledge, which goes back to the invisibility/positioning advantage.
- - - - Blue
        
        In Kieslowski's film, Three Colors: Blue, blue represents sadness and mourning
        "The appearance of objects seen through a blue glass is gloomy and melancholy." (19th-Century Insight into the Psychology of Color and Emotion by Maria Popova)
        
        The scene of Julie in the pool is when she allows sadness to take over
        
        "Blue has no dimensions, it is beyond dimensions, whereas the other colours are not." ("The Evolution of Art towards the Inmaterial" by Yves Klein)
        
        The swimming pool scene is an exchange of blues and blacks; also represents expansiveness of grief #
        
        Also, Julie eats a blue lollipop in her grief
        
        "Kieslowski's Julie eats childhood; a flavour walled off in blue, like her daughter's now empty azure bedroom. She swallows her daughter Anna. Julie's eating of the blue lollipop is an eating of Anna in order to bury her within herself, just as I imagined the eating of my own mother, when reflecting on childhood memories." (Blue Mythologies: Reflections on a Colour by Carol Mavor)
        
        Blue is representative of her grief and the blue lollipop is a reminder of her daughter; represents how Julie is trying to make her daughter a part of herself
        
        In Derek Jarman's film Blue, the
        use of blue was used to make
        people feel uncomfortable and
        represent how endless grief can
        seem
        
        There is no one singular meaning for blue in this film
        
        Blue is representative of a color, concept, mood, and person
        
        "Blue transcends the solemn geography of human limits.
        "Blue is the universal love in which man bathes- it is the terrestrial paradise."
        ("Chroma: Into the Blue" by Derek Jarman)
        
        Represents how Jarman is seen through a "blue screen"; in the absence of an image, the viewer suffers, like Jarman did
      - Color as a Plot Device
        
        In The Wizard of Oz, color is used to represent the magic of Oz
        
        Color is immersive in this film and represents an escapist fantasy. "But because children see with pure eyes, without allowing themselves to be emotionally disconcerting, it is something spiritual: the rainbow refers not to a chaste abstraction but to a life in art." (A Child's View of Color by Walter Benjamin). Child are amazed by this world and how colorful it is. It is an escape to a colorful world, that is sepia-toned: representing jadedness. #
        
        The juxtaposition of the sepia-toned "real" world and the land of Oz; Dorothy wants to escape to another land. "By giving up preference for harmony, we accept dissonance to be as desirable as consonance." (Interaction of Color by Joseph Albers) The juxtaposition of the sepia tones and array of rainbow colors is disharmonious.
        
        Red/Orange
        
        "The Wizard of Oz is the obvious case, exploiting such devices as magic ruby slippers, a yellow brick road, Emerald City, white snow on a summer meadow, the horse of a different color, and the broad device of framing the color with those black and white scenes of Kansas." (The World as a Whole, Color by Stanley Cavell) The ruby red slippers are magical and are an important plot device in this film.
        
        Red dismantles the plot of The Wizard of Oz film (ex. the poppy field)
    - - Mother of George
        
        In the film, Mother of George, blue represents fertility, which is central to the movie because it is centered around a Nigerian couple who feels familial pressure to have a child.
        
        Also, in Mother of George, the use of the colors red and orange represent entrapment. Adenike felt trapped by the situation she was in and the pressure she felt from her mother-in-law.
      - White
        
        White represents pureness, innocence, and is also representative of intelligence or health
        
        "Every citizen is required to place his hangings, his damasks, his wallpapers, his stencils, with a plain coat of white ripolin. His home is made clean. There are no more dirty, dark corners."("A Coat of Whitewash: The Law of Ripolin" by Le Coursier). Represents how white can manifest health and light.
        
        "White domination is reproduced by the way that white people 'colonise the definition of normal'." (White by Richard Dyer). We have to make whiteness visible.
        
        White also manifests as normality.
        
        White also reflects the beauty
        standard
        
        Being fair/white is desired; skin whitening and blondeness. Female film stars at this time, for example Marilyn Monroe and Marlene Dietrich, reinforced this standard. "Whiteness refiningly enhances beauty, as if imparting some special virtue of its own..." (The Whiteness of the Whale by Herman Melville)
        
        In the film Blonde Venus, Dietrich's whiteness in the film was enhanced through her makeup, wig, and the lighting
        
        Makes sure that we see whiteness and white visibly, and links whiteness to celebrity
        
        "Dietrich's persona was constructed with a strong racial imprint: her hair was dyed to a brassy blonde, which was usually sprinkled with gold dust, her pale face was made-up even paler, and to comply with the 1930s American taste in female beauty, and with what Dyer has called 'the white spirit,' she lost thirty pounds." (Blinding Blondes: Whiteness, Feminity, and Stardom by Hilaria Loyo)
        
        Represents white purity of women
        in early 20s film
        
        Glowing images; product of
        photography
        
        "There is a kind of white that repel everything that is inferior to it, and that is almost everything. This was that kind of white. There is a kind of white that is not created by bleach but that itself is bleach. This was that kind of white. This white was aggressively white. It did its work on everything around it, and nothing escaped." ("Whitescapes" by David Batchelor) #
        
        White is an aspiration for
        everything out of reach
        
        The all white interior categorizes a colorful world as a failure, which reinforces white's virtue. "In the second, colour is relegated to the realm of the superficial, the supplementary, the inessential or the cosmetic." (Chromophobia by David Batchelor) Color is assigned to the world of the superficial or non-essential.
  - - - Use of blue in these paintings acts as a space of suffering and stillness
      - "Black women- gender and race as key signs from which we often draw interpersonal meaning despite these aspects existing, so to speak, above the water line, while the rest of our being (the deepest and most primal parts) lie submerged and unseen."(Lorna Simpson Searches for Meaning in the Arctic Ice by Seph Rodney)
        This quote is representative of how in Simpson's images she has created an atmosphere of race and the black women behind the icebergs make a statement about whether or not she is blocked by the ice or hiding behind it. #
    - - "I am blue. I am a frozen blue ocean. I am a wave struck cold in midair. The wave is nude beneath her blue dress. Her skin is blue." (excerpt from Using Black to Paint Light: Walking Through a Matisse Exhibit Thinking about the Arctic and Matthew Henson)
        
        Creates an atmosphere of race
        
        The intense coldness is experienced by a black man; racism becomes normalized #
      - Tells the story of Matthew Henson: first African American to go to the North Pole; layered story- didn't emerge that he was there until 35 years later.
        
        Had to be adaptable in this situation
        
        We make our homes in whatever weather system we are placed
- - - - Light and White
        
        "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."
        
        (Left: White Painting by Robert Rauschenberg, right: Untitled Monochrome by Yves Klein)
        
        Light reflects off these white canvases and creates an optical illusion. Similarily, in Mary Corse's paintings, depending on where you stand, the canvas appears differently.
      - “Light and darkness are, like fire and earth, fundamental primordial principles. Their enmity leads to the awareness that Being is nothing assured, that truth is nothing self-evident.”
        ("Light as Metaphor for Truth" by Hans Blumenberg)
        Duality of light and dark; can’t exist without each other
      - " Black is a lack, a void of light. " (Colors/Black by Paul LaFarge)
        "Such that black, the presence of noncolor, is black only in relation to white, the color of absence" (All Black Everything by Jared Sexton)
        Black is the absence of light, noncolor. We find black where all the colors are, rather than a retreat into darkness. #
  - - - Without light, we are in the dark and unable to see- meaning our surroundings and our ignorance
        
        "The assumption seems to be that because the blind are immune to images, they must also be immune to the significance of the events and therefore somehow detached from, or indifferent to, the nation’s collective horror and grief." (Blindness and Visual Culture by Georgina Kleege)
        Improper assumption that the blind can't feel or understand the gravity of images/events that they can't see.
        
        "He seemed to regard this loss of visual imagery as a prerequisite for the full development, the heightening, of his other senses." ("The Mind's Eye: What the Blind See by Oliver Sacks)
        
        The blind have heightened senses and are able to feel and understand and perceive things in a different way.
        
        "Visual culture has changed form. It has become detached from human eyes and has largely become invisible. Human visual culture has become a special case of vision, an exception to the rule." (Invisible Images by Trevor Paglen)
        
        Visual culture is straying away from eyesight and moving toward machine produced images; another form of surveillance. #
      - “They led a simple, laborious life, these people, with all the elements of virtue and happiness as these things can be understood by men.” ("The Country of the Blind" by H.G Wells)
        Visual culture is as much about blindness as anything else. The blind were happy and prosperous without sight.
        
        Assimilation in culture. Poses being blind as a bad thing, when its not.
        
        “Researchers reinforce the belief that blindness is such an all- encompassing tragedy that even a cure cannot undo the damage. Not surprisingly, the formerly blind people get depressed.” ("Molyneux Redux" by Georgia Kleege)
    - - Light and color work together. Light illuminates color and influences our perception of color. "Where the small fibers of the optic nerves originate cause it to perceive light; and the character of these movements cause it to have the perception of color." (The Color of Subjectivity by Dalston and Galison)
      - Los Angeles' light- an homage.
        "The heat was surreal. The sky had a yellow cast, the kind of light sometimes called 'earthquake weather.'" (Los Angeles Notebook by Joan Didion).
        "That light: the late-afternoon light of Los Angeles- golden pink off the bay through the smog and onto the palm fronds." (LA Glows by Lawrence Weschler).
        The light in Los Angeles is perfect for shooting movies, for example, the opening scene of La, La Land which is filled with opaque colors of the rainbow and is a sun bleached landscape. It's a sunny day filled with light.