Seeing Visual Culture :
Social Inequity
Artistic Vision
Innovative Technology
Oliver Sacks, “The Mind’s Eye: What the blind see,” The New Yorker (2003)
"At this level, one can no longer say of one’s mental landscapes what is visual, what is auditory, what is image, what is language, what is intellectual, what is emotional—they are all fused together and imbued with our own individual perspectives and values.”
Sight does not fully make up our worldview, but rather a combination of all our senses and lived experiences make up this part of our mind.
Georgina Kleege, “Blindness and Visual Culture: An Eyewitness Account,” Journal of Visual Culture Vol 4 (2) (2005), 179-190.
“In Deborah Kendrick’s image of the future, blindness is a simple physical characteristic rather than an ominous mark of Otherness.”
Kleege diverges from the conventional use of blindness in the study of visual culture in order to stray away from ableist rhetoric and to provide a realistic view of people’s lived experiences with blindness.
Georgina Kleege, “Molyneaux Redux,” Invisible Culture 19 (2013)
In this satirical piece, Kleege exposes the researcher’s obsession with studying the blind and uses the story of a competent woman to demonstrate this persistence.
H.G. Wells, “The Country of the Blind”
In this short story, a man enters a community of blind people with attempts to take over. However, after realizing that they are a fully functioning society who has become accustomed to navigating the world without sight, he decides to join them instead.
Claudia Rankine, excerpt from Citizen (2014)
“Yes and in your mail the apology note appears referring to “our mistake.” Apparently your own invisibility is the real problem causing her confusion.”
In Rankine’s poetry, she expresses the microaggressions she experiences as a black woman while touching upon the issue of not being seen.
Ralph Ellison, excerpt from Invisible Man (1952)
“I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me”
The speaker in “The Invisible Man” accounts for his experience living in a society rent-free where he is not seen because of his race.
Trinh Minh-Ha, “The Image and the Void,” Journal of Visual Culture (2016), Vol 15, Issue 1, 131-140.
“Such a claim not only thrives on the binary opposition between visibility and invisibility, overlooking the complex interrelationship of seeing and not seeing. It also abides by the optical imperative that conventionally determines our approach to events and induces us to think and act according to the measure of the visible.”
Minh-Ha discusses the significance of studying the unseen and explains how this can be just as important as studying what we can see.
Gordon Parks, Invisible Man Retreat, 1952
A man beomes invisible
Gordon Parks, Emerging Man, Harlem, 1952
James Whale, The Invisible Man, 1933
Gordon Parks, Untitled, Harlem 1952
Jeff Wall, After Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Lawrence Weschler, “LA Glows,” The New Yorker, Feb. 23, 1998.
Weschler describes what makes light in Los Angeles unique and uses the Hollywood industry and observatories as points of analysis to explain this.
Joan Didion, “Los Angeles Notebook”
Didion outlines the foehn structure of Los Angeles which helps to explain its hot climate and distinctive visual landscape.
Bruce Nauman, LA AIR, artist’s book, 1970
Bruce Nauman, LA AIR, artist’s book, 1970
Nauman, Clear Sky
Nauman, LA AIR
Hans Blumenberg, “Light as Metaphor for Truth: At the Preliminary Stage of Philosophical Concept Formation,” in Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, edited by D. M. Levin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 30–54.
Blumsenburg explores our associations with light and explains how metaphor works in our world understanding such as through light creation stories, the big bang theory, and the ways in which light and dark exclude each other.
Chris Burden Urban Light
Ed Ruscha, Hollywood 1968
Still from Boyz N the Hood (John Singleton, 1991)
click to edit
Smog in downtown Los Angeles
Norman Zammitt, Buffalo Blue, 1977
Norman Zammitt, Blue Burning, 1982
La La Land
Joseph Wright of Derby, A Philosopher giving that Lecture on the Orrery
James Turrell, Dividing the Light, installation at Pomona College
James Turrell, Breathing Light 2013
David Hockney, Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), 1972
David Hockney, The Splash, 1967
Plato, The Allegory of the Cave from The Republic, Book VII
Plato uses the allegory of the cave to argue that humans must relinquish darkness for light and truth and imposes a necessary suffering that takes place before the truth is seen.
Plato's Cave
Christopher Turner and Victor I. Stoichita, “A Short History of the Shadow: an Interview with Victor I. Stoichita,” Cabinet 24.
Stoichita provides an overview of the ways shadows have influenced art and knowledge throughout history and how we have incorporated them in complex understandings of the world.
Hans Christian Andersen, "The Shadow"
“Everything went wrong with the learned man. Sorrow and trouble pursued him, and what he said about the good, the beautiful, and the true, was of as much value to most people as a nutmeg would be to a cow. At length he fell ill. “You really look like a shadow,” people said to him, and then a cold shudder would pass over him, for he had his own thoughts on the subject.”
In this tale of “The Shadow” a man becomes lost seeking beauty through his writing while detaching himself from his shadow. This detachment represents a void in the man’s life and ultimately gets the better of him when his shadow outsmarts him.
Peter Pan
Sunprint kit
László Moholy-Nagy
David Allan, The Origin of Painting, 1775
Edouard Daege, The Invention of Painting. 1832
David Batchelor, “Whitescapes,” in Chromophobia (Reaktion Books, 2000), 9-20
Persona
“There is a kind of white that repels 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.”
Batchelor analyzes whiteness through the lens of interior design and finds that the color itself reinforces supremacy and represents lavishness.
Le Corbussier, “A Coat of Whitewash: The Law of Ripolin,” in Color, 82-84.
“Whitewash exists wherever peoples have preserved intact the balanced structure of a harmonious culture.”
LeCorbussier points out societies associations of whiteness with purity and how this gets reflected in the architecture all around us.
Herman Melville, “The Whiteness of the Whale,” excerpted in Color (MIT, 2008), 37-38.
“...whiteness refiningly enhances beauty, as if imparting some special virtue of its own, as in marbles, japonicas and pearls…”
Melville attempts to restructure these associations with whiteness, but in doing so, spends a lot of time reaffirming the idea that white is the color of wealth and beauty. In comparing it to predators such as the whale, polar bear, and great white shark, he even states that their whiteness imposes a sense of mildness of their danger.
Richard Dyer, “White,” Screen 29:4 (Autumn 1988): 44–64.
“Trying to think about the representation of whiteness as an ethnic category in mainstream film is difficult, partly because white power secures its dominance by seeming not to be anything in particular…it is often revealed as emptiness, absence, denial or even a kind of death.”
Dyer explains how whiteness gets treated as invisible which allows it to be seen as the “norm” or default. Because it has no culture, it gets naturalized.
Hilaria Loyo, “Blinding Blondes: Whiteness, Femininity, and Stardom” in Questions of Colour in Cinema, ed. Wendy Everett (Oxford and New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 179-196.
“The intense brightness of this artificially blonde type does not usually allow us to see the black elements it represses”
Loyo discusses the role of the “blinding blonde” throughout cinematic history, pointing out how the blonde stereotype creates racial difference on screen.
Ripolin White Wash
Blonde Venus
Jean Harlow
Black Venus
Josaphine Baker
Drink More Milk
White Cube
White Architecture
Colonial White
Xiulin Ruan the whitest white
White is Purity Ad
Skin Bleaching Cream
Paul LaFarge, “Colors/Black,” Cabinet Magazine 36 (2009-2010)
LaFarge presents societies associations with black and darkness, and describes it as being a void of light.
Three Shades of Black
Vantablack
The Redemption of Vanity
Jared Sexton, “All Black Everything”
“The discourse of black lives distinguishes mattering and movement from any reductive concepts of legal right or standing, even if it remains entangled with and against the violent dynamics of lawmaking and law enforcement.”
Sexton insists on the visibility of blackness and the black identity in order to move forward in the movement toward justice and abolition. He makes use of the history of black protest and juxtaposes this with the ways the media improperly portrays the goals and intentions of the BLM movement.
Franz Fanon, “The Fact of Blackness,” in Theories of Race and Racism: A Reader, eds. Les Back and John Solomos (NY: Routledge, 2000), 257-65.
Fanon describes what it means to be alienated within the context of colonial violence through a “Racial Epidermal Schema” in which he is himself, his race, and all people of color at once.
Chris Ofili, No Woman, No Cry, 1998
Shawn Michelle Smith, “Photography, Darkness, and the Underground Railroad: Dawoud Bey’s Night Coming Tenderly, Black,” American Quarterly Vol 73 (1), 2021, 25-52.
“The curated images make visible the coterminous histories of photography and the African American freedom struggle, directing viewers to locate Bey’s work within those interlocking cultural and visual trajectories”
Bey wanted to visualize the black experience in America through his Underground Railroad art piece that contained displays of lynching and anti-black violence in order to demostrate racial injustice.
Dawoud Bey, “Night Coming Tenderly, Black” (2019)
In addition to capturing the black experience in America, Bey also utilizes modes of darkness to showcase its ability to leave a warm embrace.
Syreeta McFadden, “Teaching the camera to see my skin”
“But it seemed the technology was stacked against me. I only knew, though I didn’t understand why, that the lighter you were, the more likely it was that the camera — the film —got your likeness right.”
McFadden expresses her frustration with her self-image and trying to capture the right photo in face of a failing technology that improperly photographed black skin.
Kodachrome 1974
The Image Its Secret, Cahiers du Cinèma, May 1979
Shirley Image
Carrie Mae Weems, Colored People, Slow Fade to Black
Dawoud Bey, Trees and Farmhouse, Night Coming Tenderly, Black
Dawoud Bey, Untitled #13 (Trees and Reflections), 2017, from the series Night Coming Tenderly, Black
Hidden Figures:
Mother of George
Roy DeCarava, Billie Holiday With Earring (1960
Roy DeCarava, Catsup bottles, table and coat (1952)
Coltrane on Soprano
Roy DeCarava, Man in Window, 1978
Maria Popova, 19th Century Insight into the Psychology of Color and Emotion, The Atlantic (2012)
Wolfgang von Goethe accumulated a radical theory of colors that refuted Newton’s idea that darkness is merely an absence of light and provided descriptions of how the different colors can evoke different moods and emotions.
Goethe’s Farbenkreis (Color Wheel)
Joseph Albers, excerpts from Interaction of Color (1963)
Albers developed a set of lessons with color experiments that help train one’s eye for color rather than relying on mechanical conventions.
Opticks
Joseph Albers teaching at Black Mountain College, ca. 1946
Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, “The Color of Subjectivity,” in Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2010), 273–83.
The nineteenth century opened up discussions about the subjectivity of colors as scholars began to realize that humans infer what the different colors are around us based on our perception of the world rather than what is really there.
Prism
David Batchelor, “Chromophobia,” in Chromophobia (Reaktion Books, 2000), 21-49.
“Chromophobia manifests itself in the many and varied attempts to purge colour from culture, to devalue colour, to diminish its significance, to deny its complexity.”
Bachelor argues the existence of Chromophobia by claiming that societies associations of color with the feminine, queer, and juvenile leads to a fear of color.
Color in Storytelling
Black Panther Color Palette
Maleficent Color Palette
Parasite Color Palette
Walter Benjamin, “A Child’s View of Color” in Selected Writings, Volume 1, (Cambridge: Belknap Press), 50-51.
“The range of distinctions between each of the senses is presumably larger in children than in adults, whose ability to correlate the different senses is more developed.”
Children are able to achieve a higher level of imagination than adults when it comes to color that unleashes a realm of spirituality.
Todd Hido, from Interiors
Stanley Cavell, “The World as a Whole: Color” in The World Viewed (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1979), 80-100.
Cavell uses The Wizard of Oz to explain how color can be used in film to transform and create worlds in ways that relying on the real world cannot.
The Wizard of OZ
The Wizard of OZ Orb
The Wizard of Oz wicked witch
The Wizard of Oz Poppy Scene
The Wizard of Oz Slippers
Carol Mavor, excerpt from Blue Mythologies (Duke University Press, 2012)
Mavor analyzes the film Three Colors: Blue and explains how the mother “digests” her daughter in the lollipop scene which represents her mourning.
Three Colors: Blue
The Colors Blue Openiing Scene
Yves Klein, “The Evolution of Art towards the Immaterial” (1959), in Color, 120-122.
Klein argues that art is a sensational experience and that color has the ability to transcend you out of your reality and into a new world.
Yves Klein
Derek Jarman, “Into the Blue,” from Chroma: A Book of Color (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 103-124.
This exploration of the color blue shows how blue can be used as a mood or concept due to its depth and limitless nature.
Derek Jarman Memorial
Keith Collins with Derek Jarman at the showing of Blue at the Venice Biennale, June 1993.
Robin Coste Lewis, Using Black to Paint Light: Walking Through a Matisse Exhibit Thinking about the Arctic and Matthew Henson
“The unanticipated shock: so much believed to be white is actually—strikingly—blue. Endless blueness. White is blue. An ocean wave freezes in place. Blue. Whole glaciers, large as Ohio, floating masses of static water. All of them pale frosted azuls. It makes me wonder—yet again—was there ever such a thing as whiteness? I am beginning to grow suspicious.”
Lewis’ poetry utilizes contemplation with the subjects of color and race while engaging with the explorations of Matthew Henson.
Lorna Simpson, Specific Notation, 2019
Blue turned temporal, 2019, detail
Seph Rodney, Lorna Simpson Searches for Meaning in the Arctic Ice
“Simpson’s photographic work has always been exceptionally strong in demonstrating the taut relation between images of the Black woman’s body and language that pulls her body into politics, saga, elegy, and poetry.”
Michel Foucault, “Panopticism” from Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (NY: Vintage Books, 1995) (1975), 195-228.
“The faceless gaze transformed the whole social budget into a field of perception”
Foucault presents a panoptic vision that has the power of control and constitutes a system of oppression.
The Panopticon
Trevor Paglen, “Invisible Images (Your Pictures Are Looking at You),” The New Inquiry, 2016.
“When you put an image on Facebook or other social media, you’re feeding an array of immensely powerful artificial intelligence systems information about how to identify people and how to recognize places and objects, habits and preferences, race, class, and gender identifications, economic statuses, and much more.”
Palgen discusses how in the new age of technology, putting our photos online opens up an oversight that analyzes them which is completely unseeable on our end.
Vito Acconci, Following Piece (1979)
Acconci’s project consisted of following people around town until they entered a private space.
Vito Acconci Following Piece
Sophie Calle, Suite Vénitienne (1981)
After meeting a man at a party, Vénitienne follows the man to Venice and documents her project through photographs of the man and journal entries contemplating her intentions and feelings toward him.
Suite Vénitienne by Sophie Calle, 1979 2