Luminance Glare Research Articles

Assessing glare. Part 2: Modifying Unified Glare Rating for uniform and non-uniform LED luminaires

This paper proposes a new glare model for assessing discomfort glare caused by LED luminaires having different luminance uniformities. It has been derived from the glare rating data for different groups of LED luminaires representing different degrees of luminance uniformity. In total, 5040 glare ratings were collected. Unified Glare Rating was tested using these data. It was found that Unified Glare Rating under-estimates the glare perception produced by non-uniform luminance glare sources. Furthermore, two modified Unified Glare Rating models proposed by Tashiro et al. and by the present authors were tested. They both performed well when predicting the results for LED luminaires having different luminance uniformities.

Seeing Black

Seeing Black Sarah Blackwood (bio) Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery. By Deborah Willis and Barbara Krauthamer. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013. 248 pages. $35.00 (cloth). Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum. By Bridget R. Cooks. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. 205 pages. $29.95 (paper). Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle. By Leigh Raiford. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. 293 pages. $47.50 (cloth). $27.95 (paper). Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity. By Maurice O. Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. 400 pages. $99.95 (cloth). $27.95 (paper). In 1969 the Metropolitan Museum of Art mounted an exhibition titled “Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900–1968.” The exhibition, composed mainly of documentary photographs, stirred controversy. Bringing what the New York Times called “sociology” into an art museum, the exhibition neglected to include any works of art by Harlem artists, and was organized and curated without any input from residents of the neighborhood just a handful of blocks north of the museum. This exhibition raised the ire of the black communities it excluded, who in turn argued that the museum seemed to mistake mere visual representation for social advocacy.1 I open this review of recent work on African Americans and visual culture with this particular exhibition, which the art historian Bridget R. Cooks examines in Exhibiting Blackness, because it distills a number of themes central to the flourishing field of African American visual culture studies. This field links questions about the relationships between photography, art, and racial identity, the place of black artists within and without the canon and white [End Page 927] artistic institutions, and the long history of visual representations of black individuals in the United States. The question of representation has long been vexed for people of African descent in the Americas. Indeed, representation by others and the capacity for self-representation have been at the heart of racial politics. White supremacy founded itself on a belief in the inability of people of color to give form to experience in a manner approaching art. In 1781, for example, Thomas Jefferson declared that “never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration; never see even an elementary trait of painting or sculpture.”2 Shorn, by this logic, of this basic human faculty, African Americans were everywhere represented by others in images and narratives that tended to confirm their inhumanity. Not surprisingly, in the nineteenth century, the new and purportedly objective medium of photography reinforced the racial hierarchy—as, for example, in the infamous Louis Agassiz slave daguerreotypes. Jefferson was, of course, wrong about African capacities for representation beyond the utilitarian, as centuries of African American literature, music, and material culture attest. Scholarship over the past century has largely succeeded in bringing these achievements of people of color into full view, if not into the canon. Scholarship on African American participation in the plastic and visual arts, however, has only recently begun to have the same impact.3 The reasons for the delay in scholarly attention to black visual culture are multiple and intersecting. Traditional art historical methods, with their emphasis on artistic training, money, influence, the aesthetic as “common” (and unraced) sense, and mediating systems and institutions such as patronage and museums often exclude a priori the visual art forms most commonly produced (and consumed) by African Americans: craft, vernacular, and popular forms. The rise of what is called “visual culture studies” has been a boon to the study of African American visuality, given the flexibility of this approach.4 The methods of “visual culture” have enabled scholarly work like that under consideration here by attempting to do away with “high” and “low” forms of art, considering vernacular and popular media forms in addition to painting, drawing, and sculpture, and perhaps most importantly, moving the production of meaning away from the solitary artist toward an understanding of the meaning-making collaboration between producer, viewer, and object. Yet traditional art institutions and analytic practices remain...

Imprisioned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle by Leigh Raiford (review)

Reviewed by: Imprisioned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle by Leigh Raiford Maurice L. Bryan Jr. Imprisioned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle. By Leigh Raiford. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2011. Leigh Raiford’s examination of photography’s participation during three critical moments in African American history is an exemplary and engaging work that advances the conversation of African Americans and the making of America, then and now. Raiford’s text is thick with detailed evidence to back up her penetrating and provocative analysis. Raiford employs three interrogation sites, the black body, the black eye, and black memory to view the photographic image at the edges, the center, and over time. Chapter 1 looks at the anti-lynching campaign of the early twentieth century and the work of Ida B. Wells and the NAACP to transform and reframe the photography of lynching into anti-lynching photography. She explores the question of how capturing the abject black body can be used to reverse the dominant discourse and serve as a unifying mode of identification that would promote social justice. In chapter 2 Raiford looks at the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), one of the key civil rights groups who recognized the importance of photography to not only document but also serve as a means to engage the community and gain some control over media communication. Raiford, in chapter 3, discusses the “insurgent visibility” of the Black Panther Party (BPP). While earlier SNCC photographs had brought individuals like Bob [End Page 92] Moses from Harlem to the south, the “heightened visibility” of the Black Panther Party recruited blacks in the north to take a stand in their own neighborhoods. The Black Panther Party knew a key site to wage their battle for black liberation was in the field of visibility, image making, and performance. The Black Panther Party sought to revise the definition of the black body, and treat black people as looking subjects worthy of direct address. This was done, in part, by the party uniform, the black beret, leather jackets, afro, and the creative use of photographic images. In her final chapter, Raiford engages us in the present moment through her analysis of the Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (2000) traveling exhibit that displayed photographs from the anti-lynching period; the fortieth anniversary of the BPP Black Panther Rank and File (2006) show displaying amateur and professional photography of the BPP, and contemporary artwork inspired by the BPP movement; and the Road to Freedom: Photographs of the Civil Rights Movement, 1956–1968 exhibit (2008) at the High Museum in Atlanta commemorating the fortieth anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination with close to two hundred images of the civil rights era. Raiford examines the meaning of these historical photographs for contemporary audiences. As noted earlier, Leigh Raiford’s work adds a welcomed voice and perspective to the visual dialogue between past and present, as we attempt to understand the significant role photography played in visualizing the black material subject, black spectatorship, and black memory. Maurice L. Bryan Jr. California State University, Chico Copyright © 2013 Mid-America American Studies Association

Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle (review)

Reviewed by: Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle Zoe Trodd Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle Leigh Raiford Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011; 312 pages. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8078-3430-5 During the peak years of the desegregation movement, Martin Luther King Jr. repeatedly explained that visibility was vital to success. “Injustice must be exposed, with all the tensions its exposure creates,” he wrote in 1963. The following year, he noted that the [End Page 149] activist should “force his oppressor to commit his brutality openly . . . with the rest of the world looking on.” He referenced the media’s coverage of the Birmingham campaign and explained, “The brutality with which officials would have quelled the black individual became impotent when it could not be pursued with stealth and remain unobserved. It was caught—as a fugitive from a penitentiary is often caught—in gigantic circling spotlights. It was imprisoned in a luminous glare revealing the naked truth to the whole world.” King’s observations reflect a broader understanding on the part of civil rights activists that photography was a key weapon in the freedom struggle. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) enlisted and trained photographers, while the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Congress of Racial Equality supported several. Some leaders took photographs themselves, including Wyatt Walker and Andrew Young of SCLC, and James Forman and Robert Zellner of SNCC. Activists turned photographs into posters, printed them in pamphlets, and displayed them in freedom houses. Outside civil rights organizations, Gordon Parks, Charles Moore, and Frank Dandridge photographed the movement’s events and figures for Life, and photographs of violence against protestors appeared on the front pages of the New York Times and other newspapers. Responding to photographs of the 1963 Birmingham campaign that showed police dogs attacking student demonstrators and fire hoses knocking down protestors, Burke Marshall of the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice claimed the images “stirred the feelings” of most whites in the country. For his part, President Kennedy said that the images made him “sick”—their eloquence exceeding that of “explanatory words.” Leigh Raiford, an associate professor of African American Studies at the University of California at Berkeley and previously the coeditor of The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory (University of Georgia Press, 2006), takes her book’s title from King’s description of such photographs as a “luminous glare.” In this first full length study of photography’s relationship to the freedom struggle, she goes further than a recent cluster of very strong books about visuality and the long civil rights movement that began in anti-lynching, including Shawn Michelle Smith’s Photography on the Color Line: W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, [End Page 150] and Visual Culture (Duke University Press, 2004), Dora Apel and Shawn Michelle Smith’s Lynching Photographs (University of California Press, 2008), Amy Louise Wood’s Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890–1940 (University of North Carolina Press, 2009), Elizabeth Abel’s Signs of the Times: The Visual Politics of Jim Crow (University of California Press, 2010), and Martin Berger’s Seeing Through Race: A Reinterpretation of Civil Rights Photography (University of California Press, 2011). By stretching her analysis from the anti-lynching campaign (mainly Ida B. Wells and the [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People] NAACP), through the Civil Rights Movement (mainly SNCC), to the Black Power Movement (mainly the Black Panther newspaper and Emory Douglas’s photo collages), Raiford is able to chart a shifting, complex, and longstanding relationship between photography and activism, ultimately proving that black visuality has been inextricably connected to the freedom struggle’s construction, development, and consumption. Activists used photographs to remake black identity, reframe national identity, and reject dominant racial ideology, as Raiford demonstrates in this deeply researched and persuasively argued book. Some of the book’s numerous other contributions include an assessment of how activists recontextualized lynching photographs so that their purpose became protest rather than celebration; the demonstration that SNCC’s control of its own media was vital to the movement; and the argument that...

Image and Labor in a Longer, Broader Civil Rights Movement

Image and Labor in a Longer, Broader Civil Rights Movement Kate Sampsell-Willmann (bio) Cornelius L. Bynum. A. Philip Randolph and the Struggle for Civil Rights. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010. x + 244 pp. Illustrations, bibliography, notes, and index. $75.00 (cloth); $25.00 (paper). Leigh Raiford. Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. 293 pp. Photos, bibliography, notes, and index. $45.00. In the last decade, scholars have reconsidered the temporal span of the African American Civil Rights Movement (CRM): taken together, which moments of heroism and conscience are to be included in the “modern” CRM? Once considered to be tightly bracketed by the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott and the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., historians have erased that arbitrary end point, correctly extending the ongoing struggle for full political citizenship into the present. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall’s 2004 American Historical Association presidential address, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” is the landmark publication marking the shift.1 And although her essay and the efforts of other historians since have nominally encouraged lengthening the study of the organized movement to a place earlier in time than the 1950s, few have written in that temporal direction until recently. Fewer still have considered integrating unfettered economic participation as an essential element of full citizenship into the primary civil rights thesis. By including equal opportunity to economic justice in the panoply of civil rights and citizenship privileges, the date of the movement’s birth is easily stepped backwards in time. The books discussed here give an opportunity to extend formally, by a generation, the scope of the fully modern CRM, thus including economic opportunity as essential to civic engagement. In doing so, they also examine the classification used by authors to delineate where the timeline should begin. Cornelius Bynum’s A. Philip Randolph and the Struggle for Civil Rights seeks (beginning in its colorblind title) to reverse Randolph’s exclusion from the A-list of civil rights heroes. A. Philip Randolph is perhaps the least explored of [End Page 492] the civil rights titans and is usually dismissed as the “vanguard” or “father” of the modern CRM, someone standing outside and prior, representing more “freedom struggle” than “civil rights.” Yet, as Bynum successfully establishes, Randolph was much more than the figurehead named honorary chair of the 1963 March, the vocal Messenger editor, or the footnoted organizer of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Randolph was a political ideologue whose leadership is especially relevant in the present atmosphere of race, labor, and Republican Party agenda. (This is relevant especially in that Party’s attempt to redefine the notion of “civil rights” from one of King’s pursuit of access to society’s segregated spaces to one more about Glenn Beck’s individualistic rationale for avarice2). The freedom to organize peacefully, engage in collective action, and demand economic fairness is also a civil right. Why are Randolph’s contributions relegated to the prehistory of civil rights, even though one of his major triumphs preceded by only seven years Rosa Parks’ brave refusal to vacate her seat? Randolph’s invisibility might be explained by his 100 percent, unapologetic, no-holds-barred embrace of socialism; yet, he was also, to the same degree (after early flirtation with the doctrine), an anticommunist. “Socialist” is today’s easy epithet used to smear others with a stench of un-American behavior, not unlike McCarthy-era accusations of communism. Randolph remained committed to socialism as the path to economic justice for all workers throughout his life, but he saw no value in communism to help American workers. Perhaps because of his inconvenient ideological commitment, or perhaps because he initially pursued a colorblind approach to economic justice, Randolph is conspicuously absent from the modern civil rights pantheon (as is Bayard Rustin, who, despite convincing King to employ active nonviolence, was inconveniently homosexual). Bynum’s A. Philip Randolph is divided into four sections based on Randolph’s intellectual progression from his childhood, riding the circuit with his minister father; to his move to Harlem in 1911; to the era...

Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle by Leigh Raiford (review)

Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle by Leigh Raiford (review)

Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle

Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle

LEIGH RAIFORD. Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2011. Pp. xiii, 293. $45.00

LEIGH RAIFORD. Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2011. Pp. xiii, 293. $45.00

Leigh Raiford . Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2011. Pp. xiii, 293. $45.00.

Leigh Raiford . Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2011. Pp. xiii, 293. $45.00.

Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle

Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle

Imprisoned in a luminous glare: photography and the African American freedom struggle

In Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare , Leigh Raiford argues that over the past one hundred years activists in the black freedom struggle have used photographic imagery both to gain political recognition and to develop a different visual vocabulary about black lives. Raiford analyzes why activists chose photography over other media, explores the doubts some individuals had about the strategies, and shows how photography became an increasingly effective, if complex, tool in representing black political interests. Offering readings of the use of photography in the antilynching movement, the civil rights movement, and the black power movement, Raiford focuses on key transformations in technology, society, and politics to understand the evolution of photography's deployment in capturing white oppression, black resistance, and African American life. By putting photography at the center of the long African American freedom struggle, Raiford also explores how the recirculation of these indelible images in political campaigns and art exhibits both adds to and complicates our memory of the events. |Over the past one hundred years, Raiford argues, activists in the black freedom struggle have used photographic imagery both to gain political recognition and to develop a different visual vocabulary about black lives. Offering readings of the use of photography in the antilynching movement, the civil rights movement, and the black power movement, Raiford focuses on key transformations in technology, society, and politics to understand the evolution of photography's deployment in capturing white oppression, black resistance, and African American life.

Individual and group differences in discomfort glare responses

Discomfort glare conditions were generated in an experimental viewing cubicle supplied with a variable luminance glare source operated by a manually controlled dimmer. Repeated settings of the four IES discomfort glare criteria were made by forty-one volunteer subjects all of whom were recruited from three different industries and a wide range of employment categories. At the end of twenty days of practice large differences in the settings were found between subjects for each glare criterion and certain differences emerged between each of the three groups. This wide variation is consistent with other studies on sensory discomfort. It is concluded that many different factors are likely to be the cause of such variability and that further research into them is required in order to understand why people are sensitive to glare and other aspects of the physical environment.