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Seeing Visual Culture - Coggle Diagram

- - - - Christopher Turner and Victor I. Stoichita, “A Short History of the Shadow: an Interview with Victor I. Stoichita,” Cabinet 24.
        This article touches on how shadows are seen as dark and ugly but used to be a metaphor for the soul. He calls Plato’s cave a “sadistic scene” for its cruelty of locking people up and being forced to watch a shadow move all day. This illustration from Ars Mana Lucis er Ubrae emphasizes how they think shadows and the devil are equals.
        
        In 1927, Paiget studied children’s responses to shadows. A shadow is simply the absence of light and a child can’t recognize their own shadow till around 8 or 9 years old. At this point, they can finally let go of the idea that shadows have substance and realize that they aren’t material.
        
        Similar to children below the age of 8, the chained prisoners in the cave both held the naivety of a shadow. The only difference is that the children learn what a shadow truly is, and the prisoners refuse to enlighten themselves.
        
        Metaphors of shadows are often centered around death and fleeting things. They represent something intangible.
        
        David Allen, The Origin of Painting, 1775
        This panting representation of the story of a woman who fell in love with a man. He has to leave, so she traces an outline of his body and his face that was cast on the wall by lamplight. She is holding on to this image in his absence to help her cope with love and loss.
        
        This same theme is also present in Peter Pan when his shadow starts to live a life of its own and Wendy needs to sew it back to his body.
        
        William Henry Fox Talbot, Heliophilia and Cedar or Cypress, 1839.
        This theme is also present in William Henry Fox Talbot’s work. He was one of the lead pioneers of photography in the UK and called it shadowgraphy. He thought photography captures shadow as something and has the power to render it permanent rather than it disappearing.
        
        Hans Christian Andersen, "The Shadow"
        This is a story about a man who is visiting the Mediterranean, while there he sends his shadow to look at a balcony, but it never returns to him. The shadow ends up tricking the man and eventually leading him to his death.
        
        Herman Melville, “The Whiteness of the Whale,” excerpted in Color (MIT, 2008), 37-38. Robert Rauschenberg, White Paintings (1951).
        Melville discusses how “as an essence whiteness is not so much a colour as the visible absence of colour.” This concept juxtaposes what darkness means and how you produce it. The color black is the accumulation of all colors, by having these be complete opposites of each other, emphasizes their contrasting metaphors.
        
        Paul LaFarge, “Colors/Black,” Cabinet Magazine 36 (2009-2010)
        In this article, LaFarge discusses how Aristotle thought that we can see in total darkness because sight itself has a color. Black is freedom and imagination, and by being able to change the narrative of the color black one can start to change the metaphorical context that is associated with this color.
        
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  - - - Joan Didion, “Los Angeles Notebook”
        In this article, Didion discusses the light from when he moved to Los Angeles. The yellow cast over the sky is a truly gorgeous thing, especially during the Santa Ana period. Los Angeles is a “burning city,” and is a place with extremely unique light.
        
        James Turrell, You Who Look.
        Turrell talks about the importance of seeing what is beneath, starting from a young age when he cut the constellations out of his black-out curtains to have light shine through. The eyes can create from what is not there, meaning visions can be manipulated through our perception. We can find something without knowing its history and create a vision for it because we can know light even though we can’t hold it in the palms of our hands.
        
        James Turrell, Dividing the Light, installation at Pomona College
        James Turrell creates this instillation to divide light. He used a metal canopy constructed over a reflecting pool with a square aperture above it. He can manipulate the light to create an array of different colors depending on what time it is from sunrise to sunset. Here he is trying to amplify the uniqueness of the sky and the fact that even though we see it every day, it never quite looks the same.
        
        Robert Rauschenberg, White Paintings (1951) and Yves Klein, Untitled White Monochrome (1958), Le Vide (1958)
        Rauschenberg and Klein focused on studying canvases painted entirely white. This canvas was able to reflect changes in light and the change effects of shadows in surrounding spaces, playing on the effects of whiteness to illumination.
    - - This concept of light being the equivalent of knowledge is nothing new to us. Light has been a theme within many different philosophical and religious concepts. The common parallel is the truth is to light as ignorance is to darkness. This can be seen through examples such as light as a scribe to goodness in Christianity or with the Big Bang Theory which is an explosion of light in a dark space.
        -Joseph Wright of Derby, A Philosopher giving that Lecture on the Orrery in which a lamp is put in place of the Sun, 1766
        This image amplifies light being knowledge as the kid's faces are entirely lit up by the science experiment with light which symbolizes their thirst for knowledge.
        
        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.
        Blumenberg discusses how light can either emanate from an exterior source or an interior source. The interior light ends up having something to do with illumination and revelation. This is because light has all of the power, he reinforces this idea when he says, “light is only seen in what it lets become visible” (33).
        
        Heliotherapy, or sun treatment, was thought to give people extraordinary health benefits after industrialization brought most people indoors all day. This idea was thought to have the power to cure major diseases like Influenza and treat war injuries.
        Dr. Auguste Rollier examines a patient at the heliotherapy Clinique Miremont, Leysin, Switzerland.
        
        At the turn of the 19th Century, the light bulb was created. He thought that the less sleep one got, the more time there was to be productive. The light bulb allowed productivity and knowledge to exponentially increase. Ultimately, natural light was no longer needed and a light source was available 24 hours a day.
        
        Plato, The Allegory of the Cave from The Republic, Book VII.
        The Allegory of the Cave tells the story of people being chained in a cave, with their heads facing a wall and unable to move. Other people behind them are casting shadows on different objects and the prisoners take what they see reflecting on the cave wall to be truths. They are living in a world of limitations until one prisoner gets released. He sees the light and feels pain and suffering. He is confused why he can no longer see the shadows and is told that he is seeing more correctly now. He now realizes that he has become enlightened and wants to return to the cave to spread the light, but the problem is he can no longer see the shadows. Plato is saying here that light is the source of knowledge and we need darkness to see the light.
        
        This connects to the H.G. Wells story when a man walks into the blind community and tells them that they are doing everything wrong. No one in the community buys what he is saying, so they try and render him blind, then he runs away. This is one interpretation of Plato’s cave.
        
        -Descartes wants to take this concept of the cave and put windows in it which would recover the light and truth. Here illumination comes from the action of the mind on the world and not waiting for god to pull.
  - - - Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, “The Color of Subjectivity,” in Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2010), 273–83.
        While perception and light stimuli are often correlated, you cannot discernably standardize the perception of color. Color is inherently subjective and we have no way of verifying another person’s experience for the light which leaves this in the unknown.
  - - - Oliver Sacks, “The Mind’s Eye: What the blind see,” The New Yorker (2003)
        In Oliver Sacks’, “The Mind’s Eye: What the blind see,” he references John Hull and his experience with losing his eyesight over time. At the age of 35, Hull becomes completely blinded and one would think that this would completely ruin him, but for Hull, this experience gave him a new appreciation for life. He even believes that only after he loses his sight does, “it becomes clear, he does find himself in possession of great powers of visual imagery, and not just a formless luminosity” (7).
        
        Georgina Kleege, “Blindness and Visual Culture: An Eyewitness Account,” Journal of Visual Culture Vol 4 (2) (2005), 179-190.
        In Georgina Kleege’s article she discusses how when a blind man was asked if he would like to have his vision back, he says, “If it were not for curiosity... I would just as soon have long arms: it seems to me my hands would tell me more of what goes on in the moon than your eyes or your telescopes” (181). This shows that due to popular belief, people with blindness aren’t necessarily suffering and can in some cases see more than the standard eye.
        
        This emphasizes what Oliver Sacks was discussing in his article, especially telling the story of 21-year-old Torey who fostered his creativity and expanded the reach of his sight despite his blindness.
        
        Georgina Kleege, “Molyneaux Redux,” Invisible Culture 19 (2013)
        In Kleege’s article, she illustrates how we see blindness as a tragedy, but this isn’t necessarily how everyone who is blind sees it. With their blindness, they are given more vividness and imagination, and oftentimes those who regain sight want to return to life without it.
        
        In an experiment, a girl, blind from birth, is asked to draw shapes and test her ability to see light by switching the lights on and off. Everyone is amazed by her ability to feel materials and feel lightness in her blindness. She says, “but I’m not a blind girl anymore. You took my blindness away from me. I’m not blind. I’m not sighted. I’m…what am I?”
        
        H.G. Wells, “The Country of the Blind” (1904)
        Wells in his “The Country of the Blind,” tells the story of a community completely devout of sight. A man enters this community and falls in love with a girl who others don’t necessarily find to be appealing and his ability to love her relies on being able to see her. He was going to give up his sight to be with her but ended up running away from the situation and presumingly dying. This story plays on the idea that this man with physically all of his senses comes in thinking he is a superiority complex when in actuality he lacks in all of his senses far more than the locals do.
        
        This story plays into the themes presented in Kleege’s “Molyneaux Redux” because someone who isn’t blind can’t fathom a world where seeing isn’t more elite than blindness.
  - - - Lorna Simpson, Darkening, (2019).
        Simpson discusses how “so much believed to be white is actually - strikingly - blue. Endless blueness. White is blue.”
        
        Carol Mavor, excerpt from Blue Mythologies (Duke University Press, 2012).
        Mavor talks about the film Three Colors: Blue. After Julie suffers the death of her husband and daughter, she is in the stage of denial as her form of grieving. After the death, Julie finds a lollipop that she was saving for her daughter and since she no longer has someone to give it to, eats it herself. Instead of regularly licking on the lollipop, she ravenously consumes it, symbolically swallowing her daughter Anna and burying herself with her.
        
        Film: Three Colors: Blue (Krzysztov Kieslowski, 1993) (On Kanopy).
        This film suggests that blue is the color of what remains and what persists.
        
        Yves Klein, “The Evolution of Art towards the Immaterial” (1959), in Color, 120-122.
        Klein’s goal is to get at the insistence that art is a sensorial experience, through using “ultra Klein blue.” This is used because blue is a transcending color and can reach the beyond through it. Blue is the invisible, becoming visible.
        
        Film: Blue (Derek Jarman, 1993).
        This film presents a royal blue screen the entire film that does not budge and tells the story of Jarman, a gay man in 1993, dying from AIDS. Blue has become Jarmen’s entire life, “he won’t walk away from the color blue.” By this, he means that when he dies he will be walking into the blue void. Everyone starts, lives, and ends with blue, solely blue.
        
        Jarmen was against the aids quilt because he thought it was distracting from the concept of aids itself. Back then living with AIDS is to die of it.
        
        This photograph of this man dying of AIDS is the actual truth of the disease and should be made known to the public of the severity of the illness.
  - - - Ed Ruscha, Hollywood, 1968
        Ruscha touched on how you can’t have light in Los Angeles without having air as well. In this image of the fire sky, Ruscha could tell how good the air quality was by whether or not he could see the sky.
        
        Bruce Nauman, Clear Sky, artist’s book, 1968 vs. Bruce Nauman, LA AIR, artist’s book, 1970
        In these two books, Nauman perfectly juxtaposes the difference between the clear sky and Los Angeles air. Through using images of monochromatic squares, he is defamiliarizing the notion of the sky and what people think the sky should technically look like.
        
        Chris Burden, “Urban Light”
        This exhibit at LACMA is showing how artificial light is starting to take over and cause light pollution in our atmosphere, which is working in the opposite direction and hiding knowledge. An example of this is the stars in the sky at night are oftentimes hidden in Los Angles because the light pollution has gotten so poor.
    - - The film Blonde Venus touches on the idea of white-skinned as superior to anything else after Helen Faraday sheds her gorilla suit, an ugly and monstrous creature, and is left with her whiteness glowing. The sparkle in her hair as well as the light bouncing off her cheekbones represents how this shine that is paired with whiteness can work to overpower the skin of a black man or woman.
        
        Jean Harlow was also shot in a way that emphasized her whiteness. Her hair shimmers and her face is sculpted by light like Helen Faraday’s was, but now Harlow can be a product of glamour photography which makes her seem more like a celebrity or Venus.
        
        This is also represented within the Wizard of Oz, with Dorothy’s doll-like face and makeup, and the artificial light that shines on her skin.
  - - - Joseph Albers, excerpts from Interaction of Color (1963).
        Albers discusses how color is rarely seen as it physically is, it truly depends on your perception. Alber’s color study, shown in this image is when you put one color on two separate backgrounds and it starts to look like two entirely different colors. Proving that our perceptions can see especially in relation to what the color is on, near, or around.
        
        This is a similar concept to when that dress was trending and everyone was departing whether it was gold and blue or if it was black.
        
        Joseph Albert was inspired by Goethe because he wasn’t obsessed with something objectively out there but rather the way we see the world. We never really see color as it is but the color itself is relative. What is the reddest red and what is the blackest black, there is never a consensus.
        
        David Batchelor, “Chromophobia,” in Chromophobia (Reaktion Books, 2000), 21-49.
        In Batchelor’s “Chromophobia,” he discusses how western culture is starting to pull color from its desirable aesthetic. He says, “if you don’t have imagination, your color will never be beautiful” (35). When saying this he emphasizes the importance of color and how color and design must be unified to create a beautiful painting.
        
        Walter Benjamin, “A Child’s View of Color” in Selected Writings, Volume 1, (Cambridge: Belknap Press), 50-51.
        Benjamin thinks of color as like a child, so pure and spiritual. Children love activities involving colors, whether that be drawing, reading, etc. Interestingly enough, a child’s view of color represents artistic development with their sight and there is no specific reason why they like to color, they just simply do.
        
        Stanley Cavell, “The World as a Whole: Color” in The World Viewed (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1979), 80-100.
        Carvell, argues that color creates a total world in the Wizard of Oz. This makes sense because the film starts in a sepia tone and ends up incorporating intense color schemes.
        
        The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, George Cukor, 1939).
        The Wizard of Oz is an important film because it made color a part of the film. Through color, the story was enhanced. Similarly, during blonde Venus, this same thing of having a color, actually the absence of color, drives the story. Whiteness.
        
        In The Wizard of Oz, an example of this is the green that encompasses the wicked witch and all of her evil. Most obviously, is the green of her skin that makes us immediately realize that she is up to no good. This green is also shown through her glass ball after she makes her evil potion against Dorothy. This green is symbolizing evil as well as the jealously that the wicked witch feels towards Dorothy.
        
        The color that makes up a film can give the audience so many clues as to what situation a character is in or what emotion they are feeling. This is shown in Parasite when the colors of the Kim house look sickly and dirty, matching their lives and what experience they are currently living through.
- - - - 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.
        “I slip into corners, I remain silent, I strive for anonymity, for invisibility” (261).
        
        Ralph Ellison, excerpt from Invisible Man (1952)
        Invisible Man follows an unnamed black man in a predominantly white world who uses his camera as his visual weapon. Ellison says “ I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me” (3). This is emphasizing the fundamentally distorted reality for a black person in a white man's world. This man went into an underground hole during a street riot and has chosen to stay here. He has filled it with many stolen lights in an act to see in general and see himself underground.
        
        Gordon Parks, Invisible Man Retreat, 1952.
        In this photograph, the unnamed black man is put in direct contrast with black and white and lightness and darkness. He is invisible and will remain that way, yes the underground makes him invisible, but he was already invisible before.
        
        Gordon Park, Harlem Neighborhood, Harlem, New York, 1952.
        Showing this invisibility for a person of color was what Park captured in his photographs. Clearly illustrated here with his Harlem Neighborhood.
        
        Some people want to be invisible. Being able to camouflage and conceal oneself can prove to be a superpower in certain situations.
        
        One example of this is in Harry Potter where his invisibility cloak allows him with a means to gather so much more information.
        
        Another example of this can be due to structural racism. Depending on what you look like, a “hey you” can make you automatically feel like you have done something wrong. So there are times where race makes people want to be invisible but also times where they are just simply invisible by the way they look.
        
        All besides the heterosexual white male suffer from the condition of being noticed and misread.
        
        In today’s world, social media plays a role when someone doesn’t want to be invisible, especially when it comes to posting pictures of themselves. When a person puts themselves out there like these they are seeking attention and wanting someone to be looking at them.
        
        Richard Dyer, “White,” Screen 29:4 (Autumn 1988): 44–64.
        Whiteness has been treated as invisible and standard on the screen, meaning if you are not white, you have deviated. He suggests that we produce an equal code of representation on the screen to help balance out the scale. Dyer can critique the normalcy of whiteness and make its appearance known on the screen.
        
        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.
        This is reinforcing the concept that witness is the ordinary way of being human! In Loyo’s article, she wants us to make whiteness visible and learn to understand both race and whiteness, both, as socially constructed concepts.
        
        Film: Blonde Venus (dir. Joseph von Sternberg, 1932)
        Within Blond Venus, Helen Faraday is performing in a gorilla costume and is surrounded by other female dancers with black faces. She then sheds her black fur and lets her white skin and blonde hair radiate in the sun. In this scene, black people are seen as invisible to the white woman, as she glistens and shines in all of her beautiful glory.
        
        Josephine Baker performed as “Black Venus” and perfected a primitive, savage dance and owned it. This was the inspiration for Blonde Venus, where they copy Baker’s work and make an exaggerated exclusion of black performance.
        
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  - - - Trinh Minh-Ha, “The Image and the Void,” Journal of Visual Culture (2016), Vol 15, Issue 1, 131-140.
        New technologies are allowing us to see things and know things that we would have never been able to before.
        
        Monty Python, “How Not to Be Seen,” 1971.
        Monty Python shows the benefits of not being seen. The main benefit is that you don’t end up getting killed in the video, but also that you can remain safe in general. This remains me of videos of soldiers fighting that hide in trenches to protest themselves from getting hurt or dying.
        
        Surveillance happens with the internet and its platforms. The question is can you hide from it? Every little thing you do once you have a device in your life leaves little fingerprints everywhere.
        
        Trevor Paglen, “Invisible Images (Your Pictures Are Looking at You).”
        Paglen brings in the idea of Convolutional Neutral Networks or more popularly known as “deep learning” networks. This emphasizes how powerful technology has become and its ability to keep 24/7 tabs on EVERYONE!
        
        Michel Foucault, “Panopticism” from Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (NY: Vintage Books, 1995) (1975), 195-228.
        Foucault describes the panopticon. This is an architectural concept that allows for everything to be seen. He says, “the faceless gaze that transformed the whole social body into a field of perception” (214). Within the panopticon, there is an all-encompassing view. None of the prisoners can see each other, nor can they see the supervisor. However, the prisoners are completely seen by whoever is in the tower, or not in the tower, the prisoners could never know. Since you are under this constant set of surveillance, one is more likely to reform. Visibility is a trap.
        
        The gaze of the oppressor is often male and white. Race, gender, and socio-economic status, these traits are wildly important as to what you can do and what you can’t do.
        
        Voyeurism is when you get enjoyment from watching other people in a film. There are techniques with this to control other people, especially through different structures of inequality.
        
        “Optics is a politics of positioning.” - Donna Haraway
        
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  - - - In Well’s story, a man enters into a community where he feels he is superior to them because of his ability to see. He thinks he can save the whole village. This savior complex is paralleled with white bodies, especially white men who feel like all those around them are inferior.
        
        David Batchelor, “Whitescapes,” in Chromophobia (Reaktion Books, 2000), 9-20.
        Batchelor’s piece begins with an anecdote about going to a collector's house and experiencing a room filled with white. This emptiness is an aggressive whiteness and represents how art is now purging color. This tyranny of whiteness is reinforcing white virtue, purity, and cleanness.
        
        Charlotte Lagarde work on a project with paint chips of the color colonial white and asked them what this color reminded them of. One example is Meena Nanji’s work where she associated this place setting with the British colonizer.
        
        Le Corbusier, “A Coat of Whitewash: The Law of Ripolin,” in Color, 82-84.
        In Le Corbusier’s article, he says, “whitewash is extremely moral… the sign of great people” (83). Painting the world white is being seen as an act of greatness.
  - - - Shadows are often thought of as a fleeting thing, metaphorically speaking of course. Shadows are make-believe as Plato says and something that deceives children and ignorant people.
        
        On multiple occasions in the film, images are flashing back and forward so quickly. This incomprehensible mess of images is what Bergman calls the “the gospel that everything had to be comprehendible was sent to hell.” By removing a factor of comprehension we are left with wondering many things. One of which is if Elizabeth and Alma are the same women or if they are two. This deception of who is tricking us from the beginning, especially when looking in the mirror and being forced to notice their resemblance.
        
        All light Everywhere (dir. Theo Anthony, 2021).
        In Anthony’s documentary, he discusses body cameras and aerial footage and the deception that comes with them. These types of cameras distort the world in front of you and act in the interest of the police officer. Also by having a bird’s eye view on a situation, you are gathering evidence from an angle the officer would never have been able to see on their own. By having tools to help policemen and make them look innocent with a tool that is already biased, not only do they have a position so power where they can deceive others, they also have an unfair advantage in a situation.