Comments on Color

Recently, I read this piece "Why Is the World Losing Color?" The thesis is that people who use color are using more shades of gray and fewer vibrant reds, yellows, greens and purples. What the body of the essay doesn't say, but the graphs maybe do say, is that blue is on the rise again after a recent pinch.

Pink drama

My first thought when I read the article was, “Yes, good!" This is the true aesthetic: grays, a blue hint, and generally desaturated. But then I realized that my own aesthetic conception was, in fact, me following the crowd.

The Gray Chapter

After receiving a swag shirt from work that is a wonderful, vibrant purple, I had determined that the astral color of 2025 was to be purple. And so, in fact, it has been.*

2025 astral purple, disguised as a flower

* This statement has not been evaluated by the FDA.

After quite a bit of focus on hearing, sound and music (say, 2000-2023) I feel like my attention has shifted -- no, not shifted -- broadened to include more of the visual. After getting an APS-C digital camera, the latent became actual and I have been teaching myself to be a photographer. And a videographer. And in the Wizard Peter act, a generative artist.

Oh, give me green

Color has become much more important to me. And the digital visual art has fed back into my perception. I think of photography and my camera as teaching me to see. To see in different ways, to shift my perspective (geometrically) and alter my sense of color qualia. To really open my brain to know what my eyes are seeing, which I actually find quite difficult.

I have consciously been chasing a “taste” in my photography. And it's born in a similar place to my writing on izzzzi, which has expanded to a series of recent posts here -- the germ of a thesis that I am different and that I have a distinct and valuable perspective. (In the trivial case, my perspective is valuable to me. (And, darn it to the (red (and yellow)) fiery hell that Dante wrote of, that's enough!))

Red and yellow then came to be, reaching out to me

So I chase some elusive and developing aesthetic in my photography, videomaking and generative art. Photography is really the parent of the other two, the more basic art form, upstream in the evolutionary family tree. Not really, but that's a helpful simplification for my purposes here. The still photograph has elements of composition and perspective; it is the raw geometry of a three-dimensional world projected into a finite, two-dimensional rectangle.

Composition and perspective are decoupled from color enough that one might accidentally slide into some Platonic declamation that the monochrome photograph is sufficient to capture form. But that's not quite it. The same photograph may be well-balanced in its color form, while being a chaotic mess in black-and-white, or vice versa.

Beauty in form

I have no illusion that the taste that I'm chasing is somehow novel in the scheme of humanity. And I'm not really trying to push any artistic boundaries per se. But having chased novelty and global-to-humanity boundaries in other domains, I come to these newer-to-me art forms with a quiet confidence that my distinct perspective (and a righteous soul*) is enough. 

* This statement has not been evaluated by the FDA.

Color has the thrilling property of simultaneously seeming to be entirely objective, while in fact being irreducibly subjective in some sense. No one has been able to fly a thought-spaceship out of the event horizon of the thought-blackhole of whether or not you and I experience the same thing when we both look up at the blue sky: is my "blue" the same qualia as your "blue"? 

True blue

Probably there's a strong argument to be made for the case that most people all perceive the same colors in the same way based on our brains all being similar and black-box observations of our color perceptions are usually close. But other species have photoreceptors for infrared and ultraviolet and surely their inner experience of light with a dominant wavelength of 625-750nm is not isomorphic to what we call “red.” The experience of redness is intrinsically limited to beings with certain kinds of eyes and certain kinds of brains.

And there’s a wide range of variation in eyes and brains, even among humans. So the joys of color perception and color harmony are mine. Not mine alone, but perhaps little aspects are special to me, or at least unusual.

All-natural color wheel

But at this point, do I fly at this article with guns blazing, either in favor of vibrant hues, or perhaps in alliance with the Almighty Grayscale army? I don't know. This question is a bit too generic anyway; different situations call for different palettes. But at least, I can have the cultural-situational awareness that I'm playing tag with the zeitgeist when I dial back the saturation slider.