White

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by Richard Dyer

Routledge

Due/Published September 1997, 284 pages, paper

ISBN 0415095379

Well-known film scholar Richard Dyer traces representations of whiteness in Western visual culture, specifically photography, fine art, cinema, TV, and advertising. A part of the burgeoning mini-industry of whiteness studies, Dyer's White shows the construction of whiteness in the technology of photography and film as part of a wider "culture of light." Starting out by situating white imagery in the context of Christianity, "race," and colonialism, he turns to discuss a variety of subjects, including heroic white masculinity in muscle-man action cinema from Hercules (there's a great photo of 50s Steve Reeves for those of you who remember an earlier Hercules) to Conan and Rambo, the stifling role of white women in end-of-empire fictions like Jewel in the Crown, and what Dyer sees as a troubling association of whiteness with death in horror movies and cult dystopian fims such as Blade Runner and the Aliens movies. With 69 b&w and 16 color photos. Visual representations of something previously only thought of as an absence. Gotta be good.