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Seeing Visual Culture, Underrepresentation, Overrepresentation, Selective…
Seeing Visual Culture
Imagination
In his piece A Child’s View of Color, Walter Benjamin describes children's relationship with color. Much of their relationship deals with their imagination, as well as their personal experience with color in their young lives.
James Turrell's architecture uses light to create grand works of art. There is a sense of wonder as light is manipulated and a viewer's eyes deceive them. Turrell's work inspires it's viewer's imaginations.
The Wizard of Oz: In this 1939 classic, a girl named Dorothy is transported from her home in Kansas to a magical place called Oz. Kansas is depicted in Sepia tones, while Oz is in color. The Wizard of Oz is the epitome of childhood imagination
Abstract
Derek Jarman's Blue is an art film that, for the entire runtime, consists of voiceover on top of a blue screen. The film is a last chapter for Jarman before his death, and as such, it has a quality of existential dread, as well as bringing attention to the AIDS epidemic.
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Persona: Ingmar Bergman's masterpiece is incredibly hard to follow. It has an abstract quality which suggests that the film should not be taken literally. Rather the goal is to induce a specific feeling of disorientation in the viewer.
Lorna Simpson's paintings entitled Darkening are abstract in their meaning, however they possess a great deal of substance. The expansive dark blues are reminiscent of an iceberg. There is a black woman's figure hidden in the ice.
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Dawoud Bey's Night Coming Tenderly Black depicts a variety of images in an incredibly dark tone. Profoundly, though abstractly, the photographs bring attention to racial injustice and serve as a reminder of the Underground Railroad.
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Metaphor
The Shadow by Hans Christian Anderson is the story of a man whose shadow detached from him and stole his identity. The creepy tale allows multiple interpretations. The shadow could be a metaphor for the man's soul. Alternatively, it could be a metaphor for an aspect of his personailty.
Three Colors: Blue: This film by Krzysztof Kieślowski uses the color blue as an overarching motif, which has several meanings. Ultimately, the film is about grief and liberating oneself from sorrow.
In Blue Mythologies, Carol Mavor analyzes the motifs of Three Colors: Blue. Specifically, she goes into detail about a blue lollipop that the protagonist eats after her daughter's death. Mavor postulates that consuming the lollipop was like consumer her daughter.
Hans Blumenberg's Light as a Metaphor for Truth describes the inherent qualities of light that have led it to become a metaphor for truth throughout history.
Herman Melville's The Whiteness of the Whale outlines several metaphorical meanings of the white whale in Moby Dick.
Plato's Allegory of the Cave sees prisoners in a cave who believe shadows on the wall to be reality. The truth of the world is censored for them. A prisoner leaves the cave, and with a great deal of pain, they learn the truth of the world. When they return to the cave, no one believes the enlightened prisoner. The story is an allegory for enlightenment. Plato conveys that philosophers must suffer to be enlightened.
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In his piece LA Glows, Lawrence Weschler describes the quality of the light of LA. The piece suggests that the light of LA represents the city. You can't separate LA from it's night sky.
Joan Didion's Los Angeles Notebook describes the phenomenon by which LA gets its unique light. In this piece, a reader gets a sense the the LA air, wind, and light are inseparable from the experience of living there.
Mother of George: This film represents black people on film authentically. It captures their skin in a way very few films have. It uses their skin as a device, as a blue or gold glow that only emanates from black skin is a motif in the film.
In Colored People, Slow Fade to Black, Carrie Mae Weems photographs black people through colored filters. The images are a means of representing black people in art.
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David Batchelor's Whitescapes describes the potential of the color white as an overwhelming presence. The most notable segment of the piece describes a home in which everything is white. In this home, the hypervisibility of the color makes it "accusatory" and generally unsettling.
The opening scene of La La Land has an overwhelming presence of light and color. This hypervisibility makes the scene joyful and somewhat surreal.
In All Black Everything, Jared Sexton analyzes blackness in various different ways. The central thread running through the piece is that there is a great deal of meaning in the color black. It also touches on the expansiveness of the color black.
Trevor Paglen's Invisible Images analyzes the effect of machine's ability to create images on visual culture. He claims that because images are no longer always created by humans, they are effectively invisible to us.
Georgina Kleege's Blindness and Visual Culture claims that there is a stereotype she calls "the hypothetical blind man," who views the world as invisible. The piece analyzes the way that the true experience of blindness differs from this stereotype.
Oliver Sacks' piece The Mind's Eye describes four different blind people's understanding of the visual world. Their understanding depends on whether they were born blind or not, as well as other factors. It seems that every blind person's experience is different and that blindness is relative. Not all blind people experience the world as invisible. There are varying degrees of visibility
The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison is the story of a black man who calls himself invisible. Because people do not pay attention to him because of his race. He has a basement full of lights, which contrasts with his invisibility. Because he is invisible, he is able to suction the city's electricity without anyone knowing.
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Underrepresentation
Syreeta McFadden's Teaching the Camera to See my Skin describes the way cameras have been manufactured to prefer white skin. There are multiple ways in which cameras function better when looking at white skin, including exposure and focus.
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In his piece, The Fact of Blackness, Frantz Fanon discusses his experience of being black. He finds that he is often reduced to only his race. He is unable to represent anything other than what others deem him to be, which is a black man.
Overrepresentation
Richard Dyer's White discusses how whiteness is not seen as an archetype in film, but other races are. Films featuring white people does not call their whiteness to attention because they are so overrepresented. Since films depicting other races are much less common, their race is immediately assumed to be the main focus of the film.
Blonde Venus: This 1932 film emphasizes Marlene Dietrich's blondeness and whiteness. Her hair is constantly lit from above, causing it to shine. Her clothes are sparkly and her white skin radiates from the screen. This overrepresentation of her whiteness and blondeness in film in the 20th century perpetuated the idea that being blonde and white was the feminine ideal.
In Blinding Blondes, Hilaria Loyo discusses the iconic blonde actresses that dominated American film in the mid-20th century. Women like Marlene Dietrich and Marylin Monroe were hypervisible in film, and therefore, their look was overrepresented. This left less room for women of other races and ethnicities to be represented in film.
Selective Visibility
Surveillance
Michel Foucault's Panopticism describes a prison in which there is a point where every cell can be seen. The prisoners, however, can not tell if they are being watched. The prisoners are hypervisible, and the people watching them are invisible. The panopticon is a hypothetical ideal means of surveillance.
All Light Everywhere: This documentary focuses on police body cameras. These cameras put the police at an advantage when footage is reviewed, as their own actions aren't shown, only their suspects'. This means of surveillance and policing gives the police privileged visibility.
In his Following Piece, Vito Acconci combines art and surveillance. The piece entails him following a different person every day until they enter a private place. It brings into question whether it is justified to make someone feel unsafe in the name of art.
In Suite Venitienne, Sophie Calle stalked a man through Venice and recorded his movements. There is a degree of subjectivity in whether one believes her actions are justified.
Censorship
In Image and the Void, Trinh Minh-ha outlines three ways by which people are blind. One way is called "the empty chair." When the Dalai Lama's image is censored from images, most would consider him invisible. However, this did not prevent his followers from continuing to worship him.
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Claudia Rankin's Citizen satirizes her experience of being black through a series of vignettes. There is a strong dichotomy between feeling hypervisible and invisible. Others perceive her through their selective visibility, meaning they can choose to make her visible or invisible as they please.
Country of the Blind by H.G. Wells is a short story about a seeing person in a land of blind people. The seeing person believes they are superior to the blind, only to discover that his vision is relative, and he is no better than the blind. The story highlights the relativity and irony of vision, and by extension, visibility.
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Marlene Dietrich in Blonde Venus 
Kim Kardashian's house
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Opening Scene of La La Land
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The panopticon
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Following Piece
Turrell's archetecture
The Wizard of Oz
Albers' color experiments
Goethe's color wheel
Lorna Simpson's Darkening
Night Coming Tenderly Black
Three Colors: Blue
The Allegory of the Cave
An LA Sunset
Gold glow in Mother of George
Illustration of The Invisible Man