Sight unseen : whiteness and American visual culture
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Copy number Shelfmark Shelf mark R013743 Ned. Fotomuseum $T BERGER.M.A 2005
TitleSight unseen : whiteness and American visual culture
Author
Photographer
Place of publicationBerkeley
PublisherUniversity of California Press
Year of publication2005
Paginationxiv, 236 p.
Illustrationsb&w
Dimensions24 cm.
MaterialTekstboek
Document TypeBook
ISBN0520244591
Bibliographic Noteshc; Includes bibliographical references (p. 225) and index.
Geographical keywordVerenigde Staten
Abstract
We cite from the cover: -
"Sight Unseen explores how racial identity guides the interpretation of the visual world. Through a nimble analysis of late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century paintings, photographs, museums, and early motion pictures, Martin A. Berger illustrates how a shared investment in whiteness invisibly directs what European Americans see, what they accept as true, and, ultimately, what legal, social, and economic policies they enact.
Carefully reconstructing the racial and philosophical contexts of selected artworks that contain no narrative links to race, the author exposes the effects of racial thinking on our interpretation of the visual world. Bucolic genre paintings of white farmers, pristine landscape photographs of the western frontier, monumental civic architecture, and early action films provide case studies for investigating how European-American sight became inextricably bound to the racial values of American society. Berger shows how artworks are more significant for confirming internalized beliefs on race than they are for selling us on racial values we do not yet own. A significant contribution to the growing field of whiteness studies, this accessible, provocative, and compelling book exposes how something as apparently natural as sight is conditioned by the racial values of society."
Contents: -
- Introduction: white like me -- Genre painting and the foundations of modern race -- Landscape photography and the white gaze -- Museum architecture and the imperialism of whiteness -- Silent cinema and the gradations of whiteness -- Epilogue: the triumph of racialized thought.
"Sight Unseen explores how racial identity guides the interpretation of the visual world. Through a nimble analysis of late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century paintings, photographs, museums, and early motion pictures, Martin A. Berger illustrates how a shared investment in whiteness invisibly directs what European Americans see, what they accept as true, and, ultimately, what legal, social, and economic policies they enact.
Carefully reconstructing the racial and philosophical contexts of selected artworks that contain no narrative links to race, the author exposes the effects of racial thinking on our interpretation of the visual world. Bucolic genre paintings of white farmers, pristine landscape photographs of the western frontier, monumental civic architecture, and early action films provide case studies for investigating how European-American sight became inextricably bound to the racial values of American society. Berger shows how artworks are more significant for confirming internalized beliefs on race than they are for selling us on racial values we do not yet own. A significant contribution to the growing field of whiteness studies, this accessible, provocative, and compelling book exposes how something as apparently natural as sight is conditioned by the racial values of society."
Contents: -
- Introduction: white like me -- Genre painting and the foundations of modern race -- Landscape photography and the white gaze -- Museum architecture and the imperialism of whiteness -- Silent cinema and the gradations of whiteness -- Epilogue: the triumph of racialized thought.
| Copy number | R013743 |
| Institution name | |
| Shelf mark | $T BERGER.M.A 2005 |