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Seeing Visual Culture, Ingmar Bergman "Persona", Georgina Kleege…

- - - - David Batchelor "Whitescapes"
        
        "...white teeth, white hair, white bones, white marble, white ivory, white fog - always carry with them an uncanny sense of coldness, inertia and death. White, like black, like light and like darkness..."
        
        White encompasses "terrors of the flesh", purged and empty. The bare bones underneath.
      - Le Corbussier "A Coat of Whitewash"
        
        "White is extremely moral.. Put on it anything dishonest - it hits you in the eye.."
      - Herman Melville "Whiteness of the Whale" #
        
        "This elusive quality it is, when divorced from more kindly associations, and coupled with any object terrible in itself, to heighten that terror to the furthest bounds. Witness... the white shark of the tropics; what but their smooth, flaky whiteness makes them the transcendent horror they are?"
      - Robert Rauschenberg "White Paintings"
      - Yves Klein "Untitled White Monochrome", "Le Vide"
      - Dyer "White" #
        
        "Such evolution raises the possibility of blacks becoming like whites..." examines the inherent influence of the color white itself, in racial power dynamics between "whites" (western Europeans) and "blacks" (Africans), particularly in America.
        
        Binary between white and black, created by white people.
      - Hilaria Loyo "Blinding Blondes"
        
        "..since the very origins of the United States as a nation, white Americans used the presence of black Americans as 'a marker, a symbol of limits, a metaphor for the "outsider" to provide some sense of collective identity."
        
        "To become American was to become white, so much so that Europeans reaching the country, who had never been white before, would eventually become white at the price of losing their own identity."
        
        White--or, a lack of color, or 'the coloured'--whitewashed the whole of America, including newer Europeans joining the old.
      - Joseph von Sternberg "Blonde Venus" #
  - - - Weschler "LA Glows"
        
        Joan Didion "Los Angeles Notebook" makes similar notes on what makes LA unique, through their Santa Ana winds
        
        "Shadows and no shadows--that's the duality of L.A. light... how appropriate for a place where the sun rises in the desert and sets in the ocean."
        
        "..the uncanny stillness of the air around L.A... The stars don't twinkle in L.A."
      - Hans Blumenberg "Light as Metaphor for Truth"
      - Light is often a metaphor for enlightenment (as aptly named) and truth. Knowledge. In Blumenberg's text however, "directed light" is especially pointed out to be capable of causing the exact opposite: ignorance. Additionally, it can be utilized for manipulation and violence.
- - - - "This surveillance is based on a system of permanent registration: reports from the syndics to the intendants, from the intendants to the magistrates or mayor."
      - If the sanctions of surveillance during a plague is this severe in a town, questions arise as to how much more effective it could possibly be in both a city, with technologies far better than relying on the human eye itself.
      - "Bentham's Panopticon.. Each individual is securely confined to a cell from which he is seen... He is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication." #
      - The prisoner can always see the surveillance tower, but never if there is someone in it.. "cannot even see a shadow". So long as he is sure he may always be so, this power dynamic will remain.
      - VOYEURISM ON BOTH SIDES
        
        "At one extreme, the discipline-blockage, the enclosed institution, established on the edges of society, turned inwards toward negative functions: arresting evil, breaking communications, suspending time."
        
        On the other end, would be voyeurism vice versa, cameras and monitoring of those with power, to ensure that they are acting in accordance with the benefit and agreeance of the majority of society, the people. Democracy places power and supervision on one end to balance out the natural richness of monitoring resources the government would have.
  - - - Sophie Calle "Suite Vénitienne"
        
        Upon getting our picture taken, knowingly or not, we become a subject. More a distanced thing, than the living experience we perceive ourselves as day to day. It serves to ask whether this objectification is a right reserved for the observer, or the observed?
  - - - We are seeing more than ever, but we are also being seen more than ever. And our viewers have also become much more invisible than the naked eye of supervision that we relied on so in the past.
- - - - Paul LaFarge "Colors/Black"
        
        "Black is a lack, a void of light. When you think about it, it's surprising that we can see black at all: our eyes are engineered to receive light; in its absence, you'd think we simply wouldn't see, any more than we taste when our mouths are empty."
        
        Black is what we see when the photoreceptors in our retinas that respond to photons of light, are relatively inactive. Unlike touch/taste, our eyes are always on.
      - Jared Sexton "All Black Everything"
        
        "It is blackness.. as the singular unitary synthesis of all colors... the monochrome that is actually the combination of the whole range of monochromes..."
        
        "Mixture of color.. mixture as power... Black is what you get when all the primary colors are present equally in the mix. It is what you get when there is equality among colors."
        
        "our whole system is imposed" in black = darkness, and/or racial connotations and stereotypes. In reverse however, black can either be fascinated as a "noncolor and the absence of color" or as every color. The "all-encompassing spirituality of life".
      - Franz Fanon "The Fact of Blackness"
        
        "All this whiteness that burns me..."
        
        It is light that gives us sight, and a lack of it that gives darkness. We're adapted to light specifically, anything else incites fear of the unknown. And yet, despite this logic being applied to racial stigmas in human beings, it is the light that darkens the skin, and darkness that lightens it.
      - Shawn Michelle Smith "Photography, Darkness, and the Underground Railroad"
        
        "Bey's dark images evoke not only the cover of night under which many escaped, but also the cover of secrecy and obfuscation that protected the Underground Railroad..."
  - - - For instance, the color Blue in "Mother of George" is often correlated to fertility, whereas for "Three Colors: Blue", Blue is associated with grief.
        
        George Cukor "The Wizard of Oz" is one of the earliest example of color being 'brought to life' to film. As stated in "The Elements of Color" by Johannes Itten: "Color is life; for a world without colors appears to us as dead... The primeval essence of color is a phantasmagorical resnance, light becomes music"
        
        Carol Mavor "Blue Mythologies" examines Julie's consummation of a blue lollipop meant for her deceased daughter, and thus consuming the child--in a way. Similar examinations for children are made in Walter Benjamin's "A Child's View of Color", wherein "Children are not ashamed, since they do not reflect but only see."
      - "Color is an essential part of how we experience the world, both biologically and culturally." -Maria Popova "19th Century Insight into the Psychology of Color and Emotion"
      - "And experience teaches that in visual perception there is a discrepancy between physical fact and psychic effect." -Joseph Albers "Interactions of Color" #
      - "Notably, Frege enlisted the example of color blindness, an extreme example of variant color sensation... although color-blind people cannot distinguish between sensation of red and green, they can make the same linguistic distinctions that those with normal color vision do.." -Lorraine Daston & Peter Galison "The Color of Subjectivity" #
      - "Colour then, must be controlled.. ordered and classified... It doesn't much matter whether this hierarchy of colours is coherent. What matters is the show of force: the rhetorical subordination of colour to the rule of line and the higher concerns of the mind." -David Batchelor "Chromophobia"
      - "But this fading away of language and the gendered, radicalized figure does not mean that the quest for meaning is abandoned. Rather, it is taken up under novel terms.