Summary

“The Light of the World” focuses on “movie figure lighting, and above all face lighting,” (88) because the author is concerned with how imaged of white people are constructed in film. As media owing their products to light, photography and film privilege white people through their aesthetic technologies, and photographers and film-makers privilege white people by using their skin tone as standards for the use of light. Dyer provides an in-depth technical analysis of how and why photography makes use of light, demonstrating considerable industry knowledge on the part of the author. The assumption of white skin as the human norm has historically informed the way lighting has been set up for these media, and different shades of white skin had been used to convey subliminal messages: for example, a paler photographic model might imply a higher-class subject matter, while a...