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Seeing Visual Culture - Coggle Diagram

- - - - The Law of Ripolin: 1925 architect, Le Corbusier, stated that whitewashed walls had a spiritual and moral cleansing power.
      - Whitewashed was associated with human habitation.
    - - White carries a supernatural quality because of its absence of color.
      - “By its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe” (The Whiteness of the Whale)
      - White is used to enhance beauty or an emblem.
    - - Black is not a color. It is just a void of light.
      - "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." (Colors/ Black)
      - Black is the color of freedom.
    - - "Materialism, this whole quantitative spirit, has been recognized as the enemy of freedom." (Yves Klein)
      - Falling into blue is a drift into expansiveness
  - - - "Los Angeles Weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the predictably of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability, The wind shows us how close to the edge we are." (Los Angeles Notebook)
      - Joan Didion describes the wind as a physical entity that Los Angeles natives can "see." It has such an impact on our lives without us even realizing it.
    - - Southern California is a unique area because of its stability and stillness of light.
      - Many significant discoveries in astronomy were made in Los Angeles in the last century.
      - The many particles from the air pollution physically reflect light from the sun into our eyes.
    - - Shadows are integral to the theories of art and knowledge.
      - Views photography as a form of writing with lights and shadows.
      - A 1700s machine for drawing silhouettes.
    - - The Mind's Eye: What the Blind See -Oliver Sacks
        
        Nature vs Nurture argument
        
        Blindness is different from everyone but not having physical sight does not mean the person can not "see."
        
        A personal account from many people on what blindness is like for then. Some claim they see nothing but darkness while others state that their minds are still full of visual imagery.
      - Molyneux Redux -Georgina Kleege
        
        Scientific experiment trying to determine a person who was previously blind could still recognize shapes once they are able to physically see.
        
        Is sight really a gift or just something we have grown dependent on for our society?
      - Blindness and Visual Culture:An
        Eyewitness Account -Georgina Kleege
        
        Visual culture entails a meditation on blindness, the invisible, the unseeable, and the overlooked
        
        Vision is more than just what you can see.
- - - - Using Black to Paint Light: Walking Through a Matisse Exhibit Thinking about the Artic and Matthew Henson -Robin Coste Lewis
        
        Fundamental instability of darkness skewing towards suffering and possibilities simultaneously with a shifting "you"
        
        Questions the reality of whiteness in the arctic
        
        Seeing the black body there reminds you that the white body isn't supposed to be there either. It makes you think about other places that blackness has disappeared from
        
        Darkening -Lorna Simpson
        
        Relationship of black, blue, and the nocturnal. The artist asserts that there is blue in the nocturnal and therefore darkness in the glaciers.
        
        A depiction of climate and race working together
        
        Lorna Simpson Searches for Meaning in the Arctic Ice -Seph Rodney
        
        Simpson uses this picture to describe an almost fading away of language and human inhabitance.
        
        "These brutal and brutally lovely landscapes suggest a further shore, one that to be reached, both the viewer and the artist have to negotiate their way by sight, by following the lead of colored pigment, hue, tone, shape, iridescence, and curiosity and then when finally alone, contemplating the vastness of these possibilities we come to know by feeling our way through." (Lorna Simpson Searches for Meaning in the Arctic Ice)
      - Citizen -Claudia Rankine
        
        A series of poems and short essays that exemplify what it is like to experience micro aggressions and explicitly racist moments.
      - All Black Everything -Jared Sexton
        
        "Black is generous and generative, inclusive and encompassing. Black is color, noncolor, and all colors. All colors are initially, eventually black, but they cannot give or give back unless and until they see themselves and others as such. Black is and is not (only) itself. To see or not to see is the question of blackness itself" (All Black Everything)
        
        Asserts that black is not a color and it can not be truly seen unless one was to lose their physical sight. It is, instead, inclusive of all other colors.
        
        The importance of black art and black artistic to many movements including the more recent Black Lives Matter movement.
      - Invisible Man -Ralph Ellison
        
        Uses invisibility and blindness as a metaphor for racism
      - The Fact of Blackness -Franz Fanon
        
        “A man was expected to behave like a man, I was expected to behave like a black man”
        (The Fact of Blackness)
        
        A personal account of racism where the author states that the white world barred him from participation. People are not defined by themselves but by the environment. The black man is only black in relation to the white man.
        
        "Color prejudice is nothing more than the unreasoning hatred of one race for another, the contempt of the stronger richer peoples for those whom they consider inferior to themselves and the bitter resentment of those who are kept in subjection and are so frequently insulted. As color is the most obvious outward manifestation of race it has been made the criterion by which men are judged irrespective of their social or educational attainments." (The Fact of Blackness)
        
        Blinding Blondes: Whiteness, Femininity, and Stardom -Hilaria Loyo
        
        The white celebrity is established by its relationship to blackness
        
        Women in films represent the “ideal whiteness”
        
        Blonde Venus -Joseph von Sternberg
        
        Insists that race is visible display
        
        Film follows rise, fall, and rise of Helen, the protagonist, in various roles (mother, singer, prostitute etc.)
        
        Links whiteness to shine, glow, celebrity
      - White -Richard Dyer
        
        As long as we keep seeing whiteness as invisible, it will keep being seen as the default experience.
        
        Whiteness is never explicitly represented in films compared to other races. Race itself is performative and is significant to the landscape of culture.
    - - Panopticism -Michael Foucault
        
        Social control performed by one entity, the watchman, that can see everything while the prisoners see nothing.
        
        “The faceless gaze transformed the whole social body into a field of perception” (Panopticism)
        
        A model of how Michael Foucalt
        thought society should function.
        
        Asserts that visibility is a trap. People will recalibrate their morals if they believe they are under constant surveillance.
      - All Light Everywhere -Theo Anthony
        
        A film of uncertainty that discusses cinema’s relationship to the history of optics and visual control
        
        Compares the technology of cinema to technology of control
        
        Police body cameras’ field of vision distorts the world in front of it and obscures the most important actor, rendering the policeman invisible. You might know something but it might not be the COMPLETE knowledge. Even a camera does not capture all.
      - Chromophobia
        -David Batchelor
        
        Color has been the object of extreme prejudice in Western culture out of fear.
        
        Purging of color as a metaphor for white tyranny.
        
        White is made out to be the property of some foreign body usually the feminine, non western, primitive, childish/ infantile, diseased, or queer so it is considered alien or dangerous.
      - Suite Venitienne -Sophie Calle
        
        The photographer, Sophie Calle, taking photos of a man she meets at a party who told her he was going to Venice.
        
        Filmic quality to the photos
        
        Where does the autonomy of privacy begin and end?
      - The Image and the Void -Trinh Minh-Ha
        
        There is invisibility within the visible
        
        Uses the metaphor of an empty chair for absence to talk about the censorship of the Chinese government.
    - - An Account of African immigrant life in present day Brooklyn
      - Explores themes of sexism and racism
      - Uses physical barriers between the camera and the actors to keep the audience at an emotional distance
  - - - Minimalism style 1957
      - Showing that absence can create “zones of immaterial pictorial sensibility” (Yves Klein).
      - What the viewer sees from a black slate is entirely up to them.
    - - A precursor to minimalism and conceptualism.
      - Power in the painting lies in the shifts in attention of physical sight they require from the viewer, asking us to slow down, watch, and inspect to find a meaning.
    - - A story about a community of people who are all blind and have learned to live due to being cut off form the outside world. An outsider with physical sight is amazed at how they've managed to create a life where sight is not necessary,
      - “Not seeing” = not seeing a world based on sight
      - Vision is only essential to us because we've perceived it to be so.
    - - A conversation between Socrates and Glaucon where Socrates tells a story about prisoners who only know the shadows on the wall of the cave.
        
        Once one man escapes but is blinded by the sun, others do not wish to leave the cave because they perceive his injury as a threat despite all the other good things of the outside world.
      - Used as a metaphor for the decision between beliefs and education.
    - - A short film that discusses the capabilities of invisibility and perception from the point of view of the modern camera.
    - - Comedy sketch pretending to be a government advertisement about how to not be seen
      - Professes about the value of not being seen.
    - - The declaration of color established the imminent future.
      - Black and white are perceived to be the natural media of visual drama.
    - - Each person "feels" a color differently.
      - Each experience is unique because there is no way to verify the truthfulness of each sensation.
  - - - Film depicts Dorothy, the main character, literally falling into a world of color/
      - Uses color as a way to physically represent social classes for the audience.
      - Overall moral is to be who you are, not who everyone else wants you to be.
    - - Film about an actress, Elizabeth, who has suddenly gone mute and a nurse, Alma, spends time with her to figure out why. The two women slowly merge into becoming one as they spend time together where the nurse seems to take over the persona of the actress.
      - Uses visual elements such as overlaying the two women's faces together to visually depict the two souls merging into one
      - The title is singular to represent the one soul of the two women.
      - The boiling water Alma threatens to throw at Elizabeth is depicts the literal breaking of their connected psyches.
    - - One of a trilogy of films that uses color to depict the ideals of the French Revolution. This specific film uses blue to represent emotional liberty.
      - Story told through color and music.
      - As the film progresses, the meaning of the color blue shifts from despair to hope as the protagonist reaches a state of emotional liberty.
    - - Loss is repeated over and over shown through the blue repeating throughout the text.
      - Brings up the question of what does it mean to experience loss and grief.
      - Image of sucking on a lollipop as if she's ingesting her daughter
    - - Into the Blue -Derek Jarman
        
        Asserts that blue has no dimensions. The film depicts this assertion that blue is everything- a person, place, thing and even a concept.
        
        Autobiographical fragments alongside quotations about color to construct a queer history of color
      - Autobiographical film about dying with AIDS
      - A single shot of blue with color and a Voiceover for the entire film that does not allow the audience to experience a moment of relief- a constant state of disocmfort.
      - The abscence of an image eliciting such an extreme reaction from the audience
      - Blue is the color of waiting so in the context of the film, it is the color of waiting for death.
    - - There are inconsistencies in photographing darker skin because photographers used to use what was called a shirley cards, white women's photo, for a metric for skin color balance. This is not a technical issue nor does it need to be this way. It was a choice.
      - “What the camera obscures is my work to retrieve” (Syreeta McFadden)
    - - A dark fairytale about a man and his shadow where the shadow eventually made the master become the shadow of him and killed the master to keep the secret.
      - The shadow self is used as a metaphor for the person's insecurities and flaws. Unfortunately, the shadow wins in this scenario.
    - - "I am almost not an 'I' anymore; I put myself in the service of this scheme." (Vito Acconi)
      - Acconi followed random people in the streets of New York until they entered a building.
- - - - Example: "In its [Yellow] highest purity it always carries with it the nature of brightness, and has a serene, gay, softly exciting character." (19th Century Insight into the Psychology of Color and Emotion)
  - - - Photographs of African American politicians and performers who captivated in 1920s Paris and served in french resistance in WWII
      - Some photos were intentionally blurred as a metaphor for history forgetting these amazing people.
    - - Night Coming Tenderly, Black -Dawoud Bey
        
        Displays the perilous flights the people took but does not bring them explicitly into view therefore keeping them away from the danger.
        
        An art exhibit that aimed to "visualize black presence in the American physical and social landscape." (Dawoud Bey)
      - The power of darkness. They remain untouched by the visual forces of white supremacy instituted on the plantation that are still continuing even today.
      - What happens outside of the frames of the photograph?