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"Seeing Visual Culture"
Film M50, Section 1F
Rachel Zhang, H.G…
"Seeing Visual Culture"
Film M50, Section 1F
Rachel Zhang
Race
Racism/Discrimination
Syreeta McFadden, “Teaching the camera to see my skin”
- photography and film cameras were developed for white skin tones
White Supremacy
Blonde Venus (dir. Joseph von Sternberg, 1932)
- Lighting techniques used emphasizes whiteness
- Gives halo effect, linking whiteness to celebrities/glow
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Le Corbussier, “A Coat of Whitewash: The Law of Ripolin”
- Associates the color white with morality, perfection, and virtue
David Batchelor, “Chromophobia,” in Chromophobia (2000)
- purging of color in Western culture
- color is seen as a property of a foreign body: "the feminine, the oriental, the primitive, the infantile,..." (23)
David Batchelor, “Whitescapes,” in Chromophobia (2000)
- "There is a kind of white that repels everything that is inferior to it, and that is almost everything" (10)
Franz Fanon, “The Fact of Blackness,” (2000)
- the black man "suffers in his body quite differently from the white man" (264)
Robin Coste Lewis, "Using Black to Paint Light: Walking Through a Matisse Exhibit Thinking about the Arctic and Matthew Henson"
- effects of racism on black bodies
Carrie Mae Weems, Colored People, Slow Fade to Black
- aims to show color in a positive way
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Claudia Rankine, excerpt from Citizen (2014)
- examples of daily, casual occurrences of racism
- "I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background"
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Truth and Deception
Knowledge/Enlightenment
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Hans Blumenberg, “Light as Metaphor for Truth: At the Preliminary Stage of Philosophical Concept
Formation,” (1993)
- light creates an atmosphere of knowledge and truth
- codependencey between light and dark
Jared Sexton, “All Black Everything”
- "To see or not see is the question of blackness itself" (10)
Plato, The Allegory of the Cave from The Republic, Book VII
- Knowledge begins with light
- In order to be enlightened, one must turn away from what was thought to be the truth/reality and reorient themselves
Oliver Sacks, “The Mind’s Eye: What the blind see,” (2003)
- Although they all have different experiences, all blind people in this article were able to achieve "a rich and full realization of their own individual worlds" (59)
- blindness is different for everyone
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Concealment/Deception
Trinh Minh-Ha, “The Image and the Void,” (2016)
- Hiding the truth only increases curiosity
- Examples: symbolism of the empty chair, censorship of news, etc
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Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, “The Color of Subjectivity,” (2010)
- Seeing color: objective vs. subjective
- Color is deceptive, the problem of color is individual variability and communicability
Joseph Albers, excerpts from Interaction of Color (1963)
- What is the true color of the paper?
The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, George Cukor, 1939)
- Wizard of Oz turns out to be a con man
- setting: fantasy world that seems too good to be true -> Dorothy eventually has to return to reality
Stanley Cavell, “The World as a Whole: Color” (1979)
- "color establishes a world of futurity" (84)
- fantasy and escapism
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Hito Steyerl, How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, 2013
- Use of green screens, other techniques to hide from an unwanted gaze
Sophie Calle, Suite Vénitienne (1981)
- Used concealment techniques to follow a stranger
- diary entries accompanied the pictures: Sophia states that she is unsure why she felt the urge to follow him - this raises interesting questions about human behavior
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Invisibility
Power/Status
Hilaria Loyo, “Blinding Blondes: Whiteness, Femininity, and Stardom,” (2007)
- whiteface: embodies the belief that whiteness signals "privilege, wealth, prestige, power, and respectability" (184)
- Blinding blonde stereotype and Hollywood: further enforces the association between whiteness and superiority/celebrity status
Michel Foucault, “Panopticism,” (1975)
- Concept of the panopticon: "Power should be visible and unverifiable" (201)
- structure enforces discipline even if there is no authority present since the possibility of being watched is always present
All light Everywhere (dir. Theo Anthony, 2021)
- baltimore police training - body cameras give more power to the police
- purpose is not to show innocence of the victim, but to exonerate the officer
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Absence
Carol Mavor, excerpt from Blue Mythologies
- exploration of how even in the absence of her daughter and husband, Julie sees traces of them through blue
Three Colors: Blue (Krzysztov Kieslowski, 1993)
- exploration of grief and emotional liberty through the use of the color blue
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Human Nature
Joan Didion, “Los Angeles Notebook”
- "The city burning is Los Angele's deepest image of itself" (165)
- "To live with the Santa Ana is to accept...a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior" (162)
James Turrell, You Who Look
- created space for the experience and contemplation of light
- association between color of the sky and the feeling it invokes
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Psyche
Christopher Turner and Victor I. Stoichita, “A Short History of the Shadow: an Interview with Victor I. Stoichita”
- shadows are an externalization of one's inner self
- various complex psychological meanings - for example, it is thought that a man's soul is in his shadow
Hans Christian Andersen, "The Shadow"
- story of how a man's shadow became sentient
- unlike Persona, this is about one character becoming two
Ingmar Bergman, Persona (1966)
- themes of masks and identities
- Alma and Elisabeth eventually merge into one indistingushiable character
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Walter Benjamin, “A Child’s View of Color”
"In a child's life, color is the pure expression of the child's pure receptivity, insofar as it is directed at the world" (51)
Emotions/Mood
Maria Popova, "19th Century Insight into the Psychology of Color and Emotion," (2012)
- each color is associated to an emotion
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Lawrence Weschler, “LA Glows,” (1998)
- duality of LA light
- examples: "nostalgic, golden light of late October ... gunmetal-gray light of the months between December and July" (96)
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Trevor Paglen, “Invisible Images (Your Pictures Are Looking at You)”
- the advent of technology has led to invisible visual culture
- as a result, humans must now adapt to machine-machine visual culture
Vito Acconci, Following Piece (1979)
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H.G. Wells, “The Country of the Blind” (1904)
- Both Nunez and the community of villagers view the other as "unenlightened"
- Both sides simply just view the world differently - neither side is more superior
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Ralph Ellison, excerpt from Invisible Man (1952)
- "I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me" (3)
- Ellison's blackness causes him to be overlooked by white society -> his race makes him inferior in their eyes
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Herman Melville, “The Whiteness of the Whale,” (2008)
- Positive associations with the color white: beauty, joy, innocence, divine power, etc
- "...in essence whiteness is not so much a colour as the visible absence of colour, and at the same time the concrete of all colours" (38)
Robert Rauschenberg, White Paintings (1951)
Yves Klein, Untitled White Monochrome (1958)
Richard Dyer, “White,” (1988)
- "The colourless multi-colouredness of whiteness secures white power by making it hard, especially for white people and their media, to 'see' whiteness" (459)
- As long as whiteness is rendered as invisible, it will keep being seen as the default
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Dawoud Bey, “Night Coming Tenderly, Black” (2019)
Shawn Michelle Smith, “Photography, Darkness, and the Underground Railroad: Dawoud Bey’s Night
Coming Tenderly, Black,” (2021)
- Bey's works focuses on "black presence in the American physical and social landscape" (27)
- Darkness is used to conceal/protect runaways from surveillance
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Seph Rodney, "Lorna Simpson Searches for Meaning in the Arctic Ice"
- explores relationship between race (blackness), blue, and nighttime
- also discusses black slave history in the Atlantic -> where are other places black bodies have disappeared?
Lorna Simpson, Darkening (2019) :
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Paul LaFarge, “Colors/Black,” (2009-2010)
- sight "continues to operate in the absence of anything visible"
- "the space of refusal is also the space of imagination"
Blue (Derek Jarman, 1993)
Derek Jarman, “Into the Blue,” (2010)
- blue screen forces viewers to acknowledge the absence of distraction/image and creates discomfort
- represents the invisible (aids is invisible to the naked eye, etc)
Yves Klein, “The Evolution of Art towards the Immaterial” (1959)
- "Blue is the invisible becoming visible"
- symbolizes transcendance
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Mother of George (Andrew Dosunmu, Bradford Young, 2014)
- Deception in plot: Ayodele attempts to conceal the fact that the baby is Biyi's
- Lighting techniques: black skin is usually concealed/hidden -> Dosunmu takes care to highlight darker skin tones by "playing in the dark"
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