Sight unseen
Subtitle: whiteness and American visual culture
By: Martin A. Berger.
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2005
Place of publication: Berkeley
Language: eng
Number of pages: 236
Subjects: Race awareness in art; Art and race; Whites -- Race identity -- United States; Arts, American -- 19th century
Description: Sight unseen explores how racial identity guides the interpretation of the visual world. Through analysis of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century paintings, photographs, museums, and early motion pictures, Berger illustrates how a shared investment in whiteness invisibly directs what European Americans see as true, and ultimately, what legal, social, and economic policies they enact. Reconstructing selected artworks, the author exposes the effects of racial thinking on our interpretation of the visual world. 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. This book exposes how something as natural as sight is conditioned by the racial values of society.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 225) and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction: white like me; title: Genre painting and the foundations of modern race; title: Landscape photography and the white gaze; title: Museum architecture and the imperialism of whiteness; title: Silent cinema and the gradations of whiteness; title: Epilogue: the triumph of racialized thought.