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Ways of ‘seeing and ‘understanding’ are not simply a natural phenomena, but rather are inherently mediated through a practice of culturally and historically specific construction (Sullivan 2003a: 1). Operations of the visual including line, perspective, colour and visuality itself, as well as image technologies such as drawing and photography play and central role in the construction of meanings and ‘contextually-dependent truths’. This is particularly evident in the images Draughtsman Drawing a Nude (Durer 1538), Lisa Lyon (Mapplethorpe 1980) and A Gay Morning Tea (Fiveash 1994), in which techniques of the visual are employed to mediate individual perceptions of what can be ‘seen’ and ‘understood’. In these images, female gender and sexuality in particular are constructed in a way that either asserts or subverts pre-conceived notions or ‘truths’ regarding such factors, as relevant to the context in which the images were produced and in which they are consumed.
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