ENGL/FILM M50

Reading: John Berger, “On Visibility”

• a looking that is like rediscovery; seeing in a new way

• in the exercise (“White transparent curtains across the window”…), “to look” is to describe and go beyond what’s there

  • you might need more artistic language (like similes/metaphors)

Reading: Lawrence Weschler, “LA Glows”

• light and lair

• the sun, sky, smog…

• illumination

• “Shadows and no shadows—that’s the duality of LA light”

• “effect of air pollution on visibility”: “different sizes of particles floating in the air… blot out or defract the beams of reflected sunlight emanating from the mountain that would otherwise be conveying visual detail to your eyes.”

Image: Shots of LA

Reading: Hans Blumenberg, “Light as Metaphor for Truth: At the Preliminary Stage of Philosophical Concept Formation”

Light and Dark

• light is inhabiting experience

• light allows for sight

• some religions and in Big Bang: universe goes from dark to light

  • dark can’t bring things to being

• dualism of light and dark like good and bad

  • light and dark can relate to passage of time/cyclical nature

• no life w/o light, so we value light

  • BUT too much light can blind us

  • we need shadows and edges to show forms

Other reading notes

• light as a source of image and metaphors

• eye is the organ related to sight

  • eye has freedom to close; ears have no freedom b/c can’t stop

  • the eye seeks; the ear waits

• Enlightenment “light” is something to be accomplished

  • Middle Ages: truth reveals itself

  • Enlightenment: truth revealed by man (truth gained from thought); mind action on the world sheds light (reason → truth; truth is unstable concept that shifts with the times)

Images: Light and Space Movement (CA, USA)

• light as a medium; not just thing

• typically 1960s

Image: Joseph Wright of Derby

From Blumenberg’s reading:

• Enlightenment “light” is something to be accomplished

  • Middle Ages: truth reveals itself

  • Enlightenment: truth revealed by man (truth gained from thought); mind action on the world sheds light (reason → truth; truth is unstable concept that shifts with the times)

Reading: Plato, The Allegory of the Cave"

• the cave is a shadow place of unknowing, duplicity, repetition

  • mistaken reality; they believe the shadows to be the truth (inevitable)

• one prisoner gets released:

  • rough ascent to sunlight; “rough” makes note of the difficult path to get there

  • prisoner becomes knowledgable when they see the light

  • when they go back inside, they will be blind as their eyes adjust back to the darker cave

  • the other prisoners would think it’s not good to go up; if the one who went out tries to convince them then they might kill him

• philosophers reorient themselves to the path of Enlightenment BUT most of those shackled would want to stay there (comfort in the things known to them)

• light is good; shadow is bad b/c deception

• blindness from going dark to light AND light to dark

• subjectiveness of perception

• whoever controls the light controls the (subjective) truth; can relate to tyranny

Other Reading: Christopher Turner and Victor I. Stoichita

• Plato’s point was that they saw only the shadow of reality, not reality itself…to attain true knowledge one had to renounce the shadow stage and progress out of the cave, into the sun.

Reading: Christopher Turner and Victor I. Stoichita, “A Short History of the Shadow: an Interview with Victor I. Stoichita”

• But previously art historians took a long time in paying attention to shadows because shadows are, so to speak, heavy, dark, and ugly.

• Plato’s point was that they saw only the shadow of reality, not reality itself…to attain true knowledge one had to renounce the shadow stage and progress out of the cave, into the sun.

• in Pliny’s story about the origin of representation, the shadow wasn’t charged with a negative aspect: the story of the maid of Corinth tracing her lover’s shadow on a wall and thereby giving birth to painting is a wonderful story, a love story, and not at all negative,

• another ancient tradition: the one which recognized man’s soul in his shadow, and a shadow in his soul.

• Peter Schlemihl sold his shadow to a stranger—the devil—and thus became rich, but at the same time he lost something…Peter Schlemihl continues to live, to exist, but robbed of his identity. (the accent is more on his identity rather than his soul.)

• German Expressionist film is obviously famous for its use of crooked, distorted shadows that often play a narrative role as indicators of evil.

  • The shadow, an external image, reveals what is taking place inside the character…

  • The poetic message of the shadow is unequivocal: it is a metaphor, or more precisely, a hyperbole of the key medium of Expressionist cinema—the “close-up.”

• Etymologically, photography means “writing or drawing with light.” But we can also call photography a writing with shadow, or a writing with light and shadow.

Reading: Marina Warner, “Darkness Visible: The View from the Shadows”

• Shadow is the stuff that art is made on, according to one legend about the origin of painting. The first portrait was created when "the Corinthian maid," called Dibutades, saw the shadow of her young man's profile cast on the wall by a lamp; she then traced it because he was going away on a journey and she wanted it for a memento during his absence. Her father, a potter, finding her drawing later, "pressed clay on this and made a relief, which he hardened by exposure to fire with the rest of his pottery

• Dibutades' act of loving representation inspired several works known as "The Origin of Painting": the French painter Joseph Suvée and the Scotsman David Allan both explored the potential for high drama in the single light source and the looming shadows thrown against the wall.

• The blackness, emptiness, and simplicity demand work, but, as if by a miracle, the shadow figures appear to possess clear features: the shade summons the person.

• At the same time, it responded to and amplified a growing realization that human vision was limited, discriminating, and linked to the vagaries of memory, and that a machine might be able to see more, and more clearly.

  • Despite these nuances, the absence of natural color in these photographs evoked the absence of the subject who had been there in full color before one's eyes when the image was made.

• Shadows can evoke likeness with startling acuteness even when the originals are not known to the viewer or are figures of fantasy.

• that shadow eerily communicates individual presence; this effect grows when a shadow becomes a shade, and that shade a reflection; then the projected image of a person brushes the condition of spirit.

Film: Robert Wiene, Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)

• German Expressionism

• plays on a sense of vertigo, not seeing exactly what you’re seeing (viewers being in the dark)

• in a world full of madmen, who is mad?

• coffin can be representation of of film (dark), Cesare as representation of audience being in the dark/manipulated

• there were colored films (hand-tinted)

• lots of angles (the bg in the story was created and lots of things were angled; different from irl when main character is talking in present)

  • helps create illusion

• darks/shadows on face below

Images: Allegories of the invention of drawing and painting

Plato’s Cave

Image (from Video): William Kentridge (Shadow Procession, South Africa 1999)

• power of images: they can deliver a world that’s created

• inventory of ppl on the move → gives depth/meaning to the experiences of the displaced shadows

  • about time of Apartheid; African diaspora

  • the unknowing/discomfort is the source of knowledge

• a cat in the foreground made it look relatively bigger than the cutouts of the ppl

• the last guy pulls the screen across (looked like heavy load) → life is a walking shadow; part of what it means to see is seeing the shadow, its fleetingness like how life is fleeting

  • we confront the world in images and we have to make sense of it

• there’s an eyeball that flashes on screen

  • maybe reminding us that we are viewers

  • we are observers but are also being seen

• there’s a cat that walks across the screen

  • jarring/out of place → makes us realize we’re watching b/c takes us out of scene (kinda like the eye)

Images: Contact Prints and Early Photography

Phantasmagoria

Images: German Expressionism

Reading: H.G. Wells, “The Country of the Blind” (1904)

• a story about an attempt to spoil the ppl’s blindness

• self-contained world that Nunez falls into; the ppl think he somehow emerged

• they think he’s an idiot b/c he stumbles, talks crazy (about his/our world), can’t hear/smell good

• presumably dies after running away

• 3 considerations of the text

  • anti-imperialist: ““In the Country of the Blind the One-Eyed Man is King.”

    • be wary of kings

    • who’s the fool in a new place?

  • assimilation and limits/disability

    • if world views are incompatible, can you have normalization?

    • social creation of norms and what happens to those outside the norms

  • not constructing the world based on sight

• Nunez tries to describe sight/things he sees

  • tried to show benefits (seeing things from far)

• who’s right?

  • might depends on perspective

  • like in Plato, Nunez like the guy who went out an back into the cave

  • there’s a comfort in what you think the world is

Reading: Georgina Kleege, “Blindness and Visual Culture: An Eyewitness Account”

• visual culture not only depended on the sighted; you can know of the visual world w/o seeing (like via other senses)

• how much seeing can you do before not blind? how much seeing can you do before being blind?

  • blindness and sight on a spectrum

• "Hypothetical Blind Man” → “Hypothetical”

  • he’s instrumentalized by philosophers

  • two sticks can’t give you all the info (just that something is there)

• Locke’s response to Molyneux’s Problem: the “cured” blind man wouldn’t immediately know which is cube and sphere

  • does the blind man rely on other sighted ppl’s knowledge and description words OR can his senses be enough to know the world?

Image: Hypothetical Blind Man

• He’s instrumentalized by philosophers

• they say he uses two sticks to see BUT two sticks can’t give you all the info (just that something is there)

Blindness

• sight and knowledge are not the same thing

• blindness not without meaning

  • blind is being morally diminished in the phrase “I was blind, but now I see” (blindness like a negative compared to sight)

• Tyresius (greek): the gods compensated taking his sight away with giving him future sight

Reading: Georgina Kleege, “Molyneaux Redux”

Kleege’s Situation

• girl is alienated, isolated b/c parent’s and cult’s distrust; hierarchical power

• girl gets taken from her family to a research facility

• even after given sight, she prefers her better sense of touch and hearing

• she became specimen; in the end she wouldn’t fit the research (won’t progress) AND won’t fit at home (might not be able to do her old chores)

  • SPOILED BLINDNESS b/c she can kind of see know but not correctly so she’s alienated

Related Notes

• blind person who just gained sight might see more in 2D (needs to get adjusted to perspective and distance)

• how to explain sight to someone who can’t see

Reading: Teju Cole, selections from Blind Spot (2017)

• “Darkness is not empty. It is information at rest.” - pg. 322 (last one, I think)

• “Blind spot” phrase refers to visual field that’s not full (part of your retina that doesn’t get light; for “regular” ppl, is filled by the eyes)

  • the world is different when you can only see with one eye

• tension b/w what a camera captures and what a person visually takes in (we have to judge what to focus on b/c we can’t process everything

  • Cole’s other book, “Praise of the Photobook”: a photograph is a photographer asking you to take a look at this

• the lyric essays is largely spoken in past-tense; book not a linear narrative

  • like PHOTO of pillar w/ ribbon wrapped around it, the lines he draws are not cont (2 photos of the lady but separated)

  • He’s Nigerian-American but the photos are from different places

• text deepens the photo; voice over, not caption

• PHOTO: curtains/drapes

  • objects can relate to movement, like the draping of clothing

  • he’s asking you to think of the drapes of the Renaissance

  • different in that the dimension is gone; sun just creates lights and shadows

• things vulnerable to light; photography, through the photographer, is used to reveal

• the book uses the past to think of the present

*we can’t see ppl’s emotions more like analogy (in war)

Image: Caravaggio, The Incredulity of Saint Thomas

*tear as the wound

Image: Fabritius, The Goldfinch

Cole is interested in how a photo can remind view of history

• the book uses the past to think of the present

Image: Timanthes, Sacrifice of Iphigenia.

Turning away is like concealment

• turning your head is like denying others’ the ability to see your face

• turning away + veiled might show his guilt/horror of the decision

Film: Teju Cole, My Looking Became Sacred

• Text as voice overs; engaging with images but also in a way that’s independent

  • Words, image, and what happens when they meet each other

• “Free association ain’t free” → there’s an internal engine that keeps it coherent

• Book about the limitations of vision

  • Looking at the world and registering what has been seen (we miss a lot; in the photo, in the photo’s terrain, in the photographer’s life)

• Even in our postmodern and largely irreligious age, we need help that language can give us (most concentrated in ancient texts)

• Color is the sound an object makes in response to light; objects don’t speak unless spoken to

  • objects don’t have a color, it makes a color the way a bell makes a sound

  • sound is molecular motion, color is molecular motion; color is the selective absorption

  • emission of light on the surface of an object

  • like untouched drum makes no sound, an object in total darkness has no color

• You can’t go back and redo photography; he likes his best photography over his best writing

  • In his writing that he like best, he still gets congratulated for being smart; in the photographs he likes best, ppl say “nice photo, what camera did you use” (implying they could take that picture, too, if they had that camera) → sense of separation that makes it like there’s a third presence other than the 2 ppl; also less opportunity for ego

• The human presence has a way of activating and foreclosing the possibilities of the photo’s meaning, so he tried to avoid it

  • Ex: person smiling → happy photo; empty room w/ bed vs. a more frustrated or melancholic image if there was someone sitting on the bed in a certain position (maybe crouched down)

  • Objects and landscapes up to more interpretations

• He looks for photos that remind us of other senses

  • He was talking about his pictures with photos, paintings, landscapes that look like paintings, etc. in them

• Darkness is not empty…it is information at rest

  • In the original picture he took and printed of the boy by Congo River, we couldn’t see his face (his eyes disappeared, he said)

  • He rescanned the negative, altering some settings and we can now see his face

Reading: Jorge Luis Borges, “Blindness”

• irony: he became head director of books at the same time he started becoming blind

• blindness enabled something else for him (he learned Anglo-Saxon)

  • no triumphant tone b/c not good or bad (not better or worse) of the gain after the loss

  • he gained knowledge

• Borges, “In Praise of Darkness” (1969)

  • knowledge, not denied

  • he can still love the books; he has to learn to write w/out seeing the world

  • Milton would remember poems in his head so he could later recite them (for someone to write down)

  • Joyce created his own language and held that in his head

• Borges, “On His Blindness”

  • birth of light → day → cycle of night and day

  • BUT when blind, harder to tell time; poetry is what remains in the gray

• he (like Cole) tries to make sense of his blindness)

Reading: Trinh Minh Ha, “The Image and the Void”

She tries to break down the visible-invisible binary →

• boundary events: everyday/mundane at the edges, BEFORE the catastrophe hits them

  • they are oblivious to the impending danger (3/11 tsunami in Japan)

• she’s also worried b/c ppl might be vulnerable to being unknown/forgotten in the future

• the guards cut holes in the papers so the prisoners don’t know that there’s good news for their side

  • but they know the officers would cut them out if it’s good

  • brings attention to the unseen

  • we can see things that are not there

• top down, trying to fix the narrative

• politics of absence

• the empty chair is powerful

Film: The Invisible Man (James Whale,1933)

Invisibility

• scientists say there’s a lot that’s invisible to our naked eye

• light passes through you (transparent) OR you’re covered (concealed/overlooked)

• limits of vision (there’s a lot we can’t see) OR property of the thing itself (ghosts, camoflage)

• who can see? who is not seen?

• anonymity on the internet → invisibility can feel like power BUT also like you can post anything

• The Invisible Man felt like he had power; was going to control ppl through fear

• corruption form the invisible

• scientific mistake that led to unchecked power

• how to show invisibility on screen → some object needed (bandages, shirt, pants, mud, soot, snow…)

  • the police needed to find symptoms of invisibility (like the footprints in the snow)

• he doesn’t want to be transparent in his motive for his reign of terror

  • emotional control through fear (emotions can’t be seen, too)

• the ppl in the inn kept looking at him through the curtains and keyhole → he got fed up, causing him to get mad and lash out

  • he wanted to be the only Invisible Man

  • invisibility stands out

• we never see from Griffin’s POV (or any other character); it’s always from a side view

  • we’re invisible, too

• violence/power grab from invisibility led to downfall

  • invisibility meant he was beyond the reach of the law; the invisible body doesn’t fit in [society]

  • invisibility as a stand-in for absolute power

POWER can create invisibility; invisibility can create POWER

Reading: Ralph Ellison, prologue to Invisible Man (USA, 1952)

Invisibility (cont.)

• invisibility also like exclusion/alienation

  • it can take power from those at the margin

• where Well’s IM was a story about his down fall, Ellison’s is about what happens after the downfall

  • The Jim Crow Era (1877 - 1964)

• the invisible body doesn’t fit in [society]; invisibility stands out

• not invisible happens b/c assimilation and similar to the rest (ppl)

  • BUT invisible b/c environment

Ellison’s Invisible Man

• invisible b/c others don’t see him (he’s Black) AND b/c he doesn’t go outside

  • you can have some control over how invisible you are; become human and sane in the world that’s for the visual

• seeing only surroundings, person taken over by the environment

• social construct of invisibility = not being seen

  • at times, maybe it’s actually to dark to see anything/anyone (when they bumped into each other)

• basement full of light (stealing from company)

  • illuminated cave

…

Image: Jeff Wall (relates to Invisible Man)

• light box image, staged, backlit

• shines light on unseen-ness

• the man is turned away

  • seeing in different direction from subject; like we’re not invisible and he doesn’t want us to see him

• man blends into photo; man framed by lights

• more domestic than Park’s image; this is more of a recusal (stepping back)

Images: Gordon Parks (images from Harlem, NY, 1952)

• photographer interested in social justice

• photos of man in city

  • surfacing from cave → manhole in ground with man coming out

  • rupture of horizon when emerging

  • the Emerging Man is looking at the camera → RESISTANCE in looking at viewer

  • Invisible Man when part of a crowd, too

• photos in the cave

  • was brighter inside compared with less bright lights in the city above

  • like surrendering

  • man faces camera a bit more (but still kinda unclear)

Reading: Claudia Rankine, excerpts from Citizen (parts I, III, and V)

Notes:

• the overlooked and the overseen (invisible and seen too much)

• racism caught in mundane and catastrophic

• epigraph at the beginning of the book is a line by Chris Marker: “If they don’t see happiness in the picture, at least they’ll see the black.”

  • in a video, an image of happy Icelandic children couldn’t really be followed by anything to connect to it, so he added a black screen after

  • Franz Fanon: “Shame, shame and self-contempt. Nausea. When people like me, they tell me it is in spite of my color. When they dislike me, they point out that it is not because of my color. Either way, I'm locked into the infernal circle. (261)”

• text in second person (“you”) → could be us, could be her; she refuses a fixed image

• invisibility exploits vulnerability and actually not being seen; opposite of invisibility of white privilege

• contradiction baked into definition of “overlook”

• oversight puts visibility in the eye of the beholder

• race is seen as sociopolitical; SUFFERING in hyper-visibility and visibility

*the image of you in his mind is so powerful it erases/replaces reality

• for so long she thought racist language was to make her invisible BUT it makes hyper-visible (makes presence noticeable and points out)

  • putting ppl down requires words to address the other; the condition of being addressable makes you vulnerable to hurt (the fact of you existing is a problem)

• it’s convenient for the dominant power to use certain language

• she can’t be seen as herself before seen through the sociopolitical lens

Definitions of Invisibility

Reading and Image: Michel Foucault, “Panopticism” from Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

Panopticon

• pan = everything; optic = seeing/seen

• prisoners can’t see each other (lateral invisibility); isolating

• they can’t see if anyone is in the watch tower BUT those in the watch tower can see the prisoners

  • structure of power

  • VISIBILITY IS A TRAP → the prisoners would police themselves since they never know if anyone’s watching (the uncertainty causes fear)

  • the watch tower is the point of social control

• OG design by Jeremy Bentham (inspection house)

• LIGHT: there is one window that lets light in (allows them to be seen; revealed)

Foucault

• “the faceless gaze transformed the whole social body into a field of perception”

• the possibility of being watched is controlling

• the prisoners begin self-policing; instability within subject created form the uncertainty

• you look for deviance/criminality so you produce it (you see things you’re looking for)

• effect of the Panopticon: induces a conscious/permanent visability

• oppression from the visibility

• the invisible became hypervisible

Reading: Frantz Fanon, “The Fact of Blackness,” in Theories of Race and Racism: A Reader

• at the beginning, (starts with an address) a child points out a difference → alienating

  • the child only sees through the lens of the other (colonization’s eyes)

• interpellation (Althusser): calling/hailing → transforms individuals into subjects and it blurs visual boundaries while summoning something into being

  • interpellation created marginalization; only a white person would say “hey, you!”

• after the child uses the racist language, bringing him to attention, then he says “I”

  • he was born; identity written as part of skin → Black reduced to color of skin by white ppl

  • his skin color is a trap → VISIBILITY IS A TRAP (they’re always described as the Black [insert profession])

• 3rd person consciousness: when he experiences himself in the 3rd person

• triple consciousness in his sense of self

  • you think of what you want for yourself (he thought of himself as a philosopher)

    • selfhood depends on there being an other

  • the opposing world creates a different version of you

  • one must exist to fulfill the idealized version of you (you must be the best version of you for not only you but all like you+you bear the weight of history and future

    • set of expectations can create a set of limits that allows me to be seen in certain actions

• like in Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison), the invisible might not also not see the visible (accidentally bump into each other)

• “Early Life: Born July 20, 1925, into a middle-class Martinican family, Fanon grew up as a proud French citizen unaware of the realities of systemic racism. Fanon experienced a harsh awakening to anti-Black racism while studying medicine and psychiatry in postwar France. This realization of how Black people were viewed and treated by white Europeans inspired his 1952 groundbreaking psychological analysis of race, Black Skin, White Masks.” - the New Yorker

  • so like white colonists

• white gaze; minorities being more watched (systemic/institutionalized racism)

• nausea from shame when you realize you’re not seen like the others

  • for Fanon, that race is his fault when he just wanted to be a man (can’t have simple existence when you’re looked at by an entire race)

• rigid system; those rendered vulnerable can’t really cause change (subject to the limitations placed)

Reading: David Batchelor, “Whitescapes” in Chromophobia

• white wash as treatment for too much color

• purging of color = tyranny of whiteness

  • even though white sometimes thought of as virtue

  • sometimes white can be used to see things (think lab coats?), so colors not inherently bad

• white spaces strategically empty → world that’s not hospitable for other worlds (other things might not fit so wouldn’t belong)

  • might make things more visible

  • the author felt he was reminded of everything he failed in b/c the aggressive white made him stand out

• no visual hierarchy, so you loose sense of self

• an art historian thought the white statues were beautiful; white reflects the most light so the statues can be seen the best

• the statues not originally white → fake idea of homogeneity in the Mediterranean

• some statues whitened in some museums, enforcing ideas that they should be white (rewriting art history)

• the statues not racist BUT the whiteness and the correlations to some good create false, fabricated truths

Reading and Image: Le Corbusier, “A Coat of Whitewash: The Law of Ripolin”

• call for compulsory whitening

  • “Every citizen is required to replace his hangings, his damasks, his wallpapers, his stencils, with a plain coat of white ripolin.”

• self-policing b/c the white background puts attention on bad specks

  • purify minds; form of policing in face of epidemic of disease

  • “His home is made clean…Then comes inner cleanness…Once you have put Ripolin on your walls you will be master of yourself.”

• “Whitewash exists wherever peoples have preserved intact the balanced

  structure of a harmonious culture.

  Once an extraneous element opposed to the harmony of the system has been

  introduced, whitewash disappears.”

• Ripolin: brand name of hard, sanitizing paint

  • he wanted all walls to be painted this way b/c then fights dirt in cracks and darkness

  • other colors put down

White (metaphors) & Ads with White

• see in ““black and white” → no nuance

• white is all colors (reflection of all visible light)

• metaphors: pure as snow, surrender, blank canvas/slate

• some things are not racist BUT the whiteness and the correlations to some good create false, fabricated truths

• fair ment beautiful…eventually became correlated with white

Reading: Lydia Davis, “Absolute Darkness”

• dimensionality of darkness; denseness

• she uses words like “velvet”, “soft”, and “blanket” which you can touch

  • materiality of darkness vs. immateriality of light (like clouds/air)

• we need light for depth perception; unbroken darkness feels like 1 massive, enveloping substance

• Emily Dickenson: “We grow accustomed to the dark”

  • we can’t see in at first (walk into tree) BUT we can learn to see in the dark

• “I was marveling at the novelty of this utter disorientation. Then I took my car keys from my pocket and unlocked the car, making the lights blink and blink again as I unlocked it from where I stood. The space in front of us acquired dimension; the cars receded across the distance; we knew where the ground was. We were no longer disoriented.”

Reading: Paul LaFarge, “Colors/Black”

• if you can’t see your body, does it exist

• black not a color, it’s an absence of light

  • also like white b/c it scatters/sucks in all wavelengths of light

• metaphors: black as night, black sheep, black magic

  • color of grief, malice, evil, contamination b/c all colors

• black as negation, absence, not seeing, inaction

• modern neurophysiology: “photoreceptors in our retinas respond to photons of light, and we see black in those areas of the retina where the photoreceptors are relatively inactive.”

• Aristotle: “Even when we are not seeing, it is by sight that we discriminate darkness from light…We “see” in total darkness because sight itself has a color, Aristotle suggests, and that color is black: the feedback hum that lets us know the machine is still on.”

• Plotinus: not seeing gets us close to seeing darkness

• Agamben: capacity to see darkness/potential to not see makes us human; freedom b/c we’re capable of inaction

Reading: Syreeta McFadden, “Teaching the camera to see my skin”

• Pictures in photo album: “In some pictures, I am a mud brown, in others I'm a blue black. Some of the pictures were taken within moments of one another.”

• Photography is balancing an equation between light and documentary. Beauty and storytelling. Honesty and fantasy.

  • “The frame says how the photographer sees you.”

  • “ ‘Is that how you see me? Could you not see blackness? Its varying tones and textures? And do you see all of us that way?’ ”

• “it seemed the technology was stacked against me.”

  • racism embedded in the technology of photography (Shirley Cards)

• Shirley cards…“The image is used as a metric for skin-color balance, which technicians use to render an image as close as possible to what the human eye recognizes as normal. But there's the rub: With a white body as a light meter, all other skin tones become deviations from the norm.” (STANDARDIZATION)

• Lorna Roth: “film emulsions … "could have been designed initially with more sensitivity to the continuum of yellow, brown and reddish skin tones but the design process would have to be motivated by a recognition of the need for extended range." Back then there was little motivation to acknowledge, let alone cater to a market beyond white consumers.”

  • “Kodak did finally modify its film emulsion stocks in the 1970s and '80s — but only after complaints from companies trying to advertise chocolate and wood furniture”

  • “The ID2 has a flash boost button engineered to add 42% more light on its subjects. Its effect would result in a deliberate darkening of dark-skinned subjects. Broomberg told The Guardian that ‘if you exposed film for a white kid, the black kid sitting next to him would be rendered invisible except for the whites of his eyes and teeth.’ ”

    • what does it mean to be rendered INVISIBLE b/c the camera was made for white ppl (makes vulnerable those who disappear)

• “Today, the science of digital photography is very much based on the same principles of technology that shaped film photography.”

• “It wasn't until the mid-1990s that the calibration model for color reference models fully shifted away from Shirley to be inclusive of full range of skin tones.”

• “Our skin blown out in contrast from film technologies that overemphasize white skin and denigrate black skin. Our teeth and our eyes shimmer through the image, which in its turn become appropriated to imply this is how black people are, mimicked to fit some racialized nightmare that erases our humanity.”

Reading: Shawn Michelle Smith, “Photography, Darkness, and the Underground Railroad: Dawoud Bey’s Night Coming Tenderly, Black

• Although some details refuse to come into visibility, looking at the images replicates the experience of peering into the dark; the longer one gazes, the more one can see.

• As Bey has said of the curated images, his aim was to "visualize black presence in the American physical and social landscape."…The curated images make

  visible the coterminous histories of photography and the African American freedom struggle…

• The images Bey selected from the Art Institute's collection represent a wide cross section of the material history of the medium

  • As this photographic framing contextualizes Bey's work in a broader history of photography, it also invites one to consider what the photography of the Underground Railroad looks like in the historical record…Bey's Night Coming Tenderly, Black not only draws out the limits of photography in representing this history; it also reorients the view, asking one to linger in the literal and metaphorical darkness of photography, observing what registers in its recesses, and what remains outside its frames

• He has produced dark, nearly illegible views of a historical path doubly obscured, by time as well as by design. In doing so, the artist intervenes in the logics of photographic exposure, both literal and metaphorical, using the technology to conceal as well as

• Bey manipulated his negatives by overexposing them in the darkroom.

  • "Overexposure" and "underexposure" mark the language and mechanics of photography and light that lay bare a norm, namely, the "correct" amount of exposure, which assumes that a "good" picture can be agreed on.

• The photographic record of the Underground Railroad is sparse, by necessity.

  • Bey's images register darkness as the sheltering cover for runaways and their allies, and denote the relative absence of photographic traces as protection from surveillance.

• in US visual culture black bodies have often been "overexposed" and made hypervisible in ways that make black subjects "underexposed" and invisible.

  • "black representational space": too much visibility and not enough."

  • In the visual realm of slavery, blackness was brutally put on display for white eyes in the spectacle of torture, the gaze of the overseer, the sexual violence of white masters, and the everyday refusals of all forms of patial and bodily privacy to enslaved people.

• Douglass leaves the specifics of his escape in the dark in order to protect the path of other fugitives and the people who might help them along the way. Referring to this historical context, Bey's dark images evoke not only the cover of night under which many escaped, but also the cover of secrecy and obfusca-tion that protected the Underground Railroad, its stationmasters and helpers, as well as its travelers.

• To represent without exactly recording is another inventive reworking of the usual dynamics of photography.

Photography and Fugitivity

• Before the abolition of slavery, the photographic image could be used to assist slaveholders in the surveillance of black subjects deemed white property.

• Tubman herself used photographs to identify abolitionists on the Underground Railroad.

• image of runaway enslaved person in the papers: The image metaphorically marks the precarity of the photograph for the fugitive, which, making visible her escape, might also aid in her capture.
  

Bey's dark images resist the forces of over- and underexposure according to which African American subjects have been made hypervisible as well as invisible.

Images: Dawoud Bey’s “Night Coming Tenderly, Black” series (2018)

• name of series like Langston Hughes’ poem “Dream Variant”

  • simile: “Dark like me”, “Black like me”

  • ellipses (…) like opacity and absence

  • poem of rest; Hughes longing for freedom under the protectiveness of night (sleep mostly done in dark)

• tracing of path of Underground Railroad

• light exposes hiding places; his photos are underexposed

  • photos show the darkness AND highlight the threat of exposure

  • darkness is a refusal to let light in → space of potential rest

• underexposed → menacing aura BUT also protection and safety in the blind spots

• use of thirds (low angle shots)

photos inspired by Ray DeCarava

• ordinary subject, but photo elevated

• window kinda frames, but not much info given; not much light to illuminate

• picture dark; underexposed

Image: Malevich, Black Square (Russia, 1915)

• black square representation of nothingness prior to the universe

• Black Square → refusal to show anything (there were colors underneath; the black paint was painted on not-dry color paint)

  • writing on edge: “Battle of Negros…” (referencing artist from past, see below)

• Suprematist Composition: White on White → kinda looks like floating/transcendence

• both limitless; going beyond as art with no object

• in the dark, skin color is not able to be known

• black square might liberate (refusal, as above) BUT also blocks b/c you can’t see beyond it

*other example was like red of tomatoes near the Red Sea; “Funeral March, composed for the obsequies of a great deaf man” was blank

Images: Carrie Mae Weems, Colored People and Slow Fade to Black series

Slow Fade to Black series

• celebrities usually more public (publicity)

• in her works, the photos blurred so you can’t see who they are

  • at what point does someone become invisible (not recognizable)

• Black is what remains → becomes definite conclusion

• i think some things from discussion:

  • the kids are in color which seems more kid-like, something that not all kids might experience fully due to their circumstances or environment

  • they’re facing different directions (some might connect to previous depictions of ppl looking away from viewers; something about concealment or resistance in looking straight at the camera)

Reading: David Batchelor, “Chromophobia” in Chromophobia

READ NOTES

Film: Mother of George (Andrew Dosunmu, 2014)

• film devoted to darkness; he puts on screen

• how to exist in a world trying to put you out ^ (of the film and of the industry)

  • different way to make a film when ppl of color on screen (see below for bounce light…)

• he thinks of color as something to be applied

• Haile Gerima: “you see the colors of musical instruments transribed into color…”

• Édouard Glissant: “We clamor for the right to opacity for everyone.”

  • concealment doesn’t = invisibility

• lots of scenes buried in shadow

• Young uses bounce light to illuminate and show different colors of skin

• intensities built in the dark (like below)

• streets of Brooklyn

Reading: Maria Popova, 19th Century Insight into the Psychology of Color and Emotion

Reading: Joseph Albers, excerpts from Interaction of Color

Strayed from the science-y of color being definitive

Reading: On Form and Color

READ NOTES

Reading: Homay King, “Anna May Wong and the Color Image”

READ NOTES

Film: Chester Franklin, The Toll of the Sea (1922)

READ NOTES

Reading: Stanley Cavell, “The World as a Whole: Color”

READ NOTES

Film: The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, George Cukor, 1939)

Tech

• technicolor is 3 (multiple) layers of film stock, each a different color, layered on top of one another to create the effect

• differs from the hand-tinted of Toll of the Sea and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

Colors

• sepia Kansas of reality (1939 is around time of Dust Bowl and Great Depression)

• colorful Oz, a fantasy land

  • contamination of color (she want’s to get back home)

Three Colors Blue (Krzystof Kieslowski,1993)

• in the opening scene, the part where Anna has her hand w/ wrapper out of the window, the sound is of wind rushing and amplified wrapper crinkling

  • the wrapper crinkling comes back when Julie eats the other lollipop she found)

Reading: Carol Mavor, “Blue Lollipop”

READ NOTES

Lorna Simpson, Darkening series (2019)

• magazine: Ebony, which is a historically Black magazine