The Transparency of the Raceless White Subject

In Light of the World Richard Dyer charts movie lighting and photography’s clear evolving trajectory that persists in its preference for the white subject. Those who could ‘let light through’ as in white’s constructed transparency were later on those who were touched by ‘light from above’ as in overheard lighting for white subjects. Lighting persisted and persists as defining of someone’s social status.

Its fascinating that specific lighting within film could function as the narratives moral indicator (e.g. a few good men) and that the degree of translucence as discussed by Dwyer become a social marker not of race but of desirable qualities of specific social status. So ‘sanity’ and ‘non-criminality’ are understood by the degree of translucence of their subjects, and thus ‘murkiness’ or a dark opaqueness could be associated with the poor, the social undesirable, those who were racially marked.

Moreover the emergence of transparency as somehow indicative of ‘human’ lighting with the visibility of that transparency dependent on a white backdrop allowed for the mental equation of blank white space as a necessity for the representation of the human face and figure which has considerable implications for normalizing and preferencing the lit subject as white.

What I find interesting is that with the status of seeing/visibility as something unerring and so the continued relevance of race, blacks are prevented from transcending their physical body. Accordingly our use of movie lighting and photography has allowed whites to transcend their bodies through their ‘transparency’ so that white subjects are seen as non-physical, spiritual, almost ethereal e.g. the white women’s glow, white woman as angel, or the enlightened white subject.

This has further implications because what is commonly understood to not be seeable is “human personality”, a person’s individualism, and so by constraining blacks to their exterior self because of their non-transparency we render their personality, their individuality, unacknowledged. Where as blacks are compelled by their visible blackness, whites are freed from the visible marker of race and its implications, and so what shines through the ‘transparent white’ is not simply light but their humanity, their individuality.