Memory, Colour, and Space
Our eyes deceive us, but at least we can understand how
Some of the best advice I’d ever been given when I was in graduate school was by Jesse Stewart, who told us that “context matters”. This was in the context of a class on music and social justice, and if I remember correctly we were discussing Noam Chomsky’s theory of language—and how discourse can guide and help determine balances of power, for better or worse. (Personally, I also tend to remember the famous Wittgenstein quote on the limits of language.)
We all have a bank of experiences to draw from to help us make sense of the world. This is true of language and connotation, and I think similar phenomena happen when we perceive and construct colour in imagery. Once in a while, you might see this old visual trick about strawberries on the Internet; it’s an easy to understand example of colour constancy, and the idea of memory colour. In essence, our ideas and memories of what an object should be quite literally colours our perception of said object.
In the 50s (and later expanded on in the 70s), Edwin Land forwarded his so-called Retinex theory that expanded on this idea that the mind actively creates the perception of colour, despite the absence certain colour wavelengths in reality. This work is still used in models for computer vision today, though work since then has advanced past Land’s model (and is certainly well beyond my pay grade).
Adjacent to the idea of memory colour is the question of how colours are perceived in the presence of each other. Probably the most well-known and enduring work on colour perception was done by Bauhaus master Josef Albers, culminating in “Interaction of Color”—which celebrates its 61st anniversary this year, showing no loss of relevance to artists. In it, he describes and exemplifies various phenomena in the way our eyes interpret and perceive visuals as a result of the placement, proximity, and overlapping elements of colour—in other words, how they interact. There’s an excellent summary of the text here.
Most of the ways we talk about composition in photography is about space—the point of view and arrangement of elements in an image, governed by angle, focal length, the frame and the ratio of the frame, and the quality and distribution of light. Negative space around a subject; division of space along various grids or in ratios; layers of foreground, middle ground, and background; selective focus conveying a sense of relative distance; focal lengths that impact a mix of compression and distortion; and so on—all of these are contributors.
So, here’s the point of this post: What if colour is really another arbiter of distance? What if we stop to think about colour this way when composing photographs? This seems useful.
Rebecca Solnit would agree, suggesting in 2005’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost, with various supporting historical anecdotes, that blue is the colour of distance. Physically, this is true—blue light wavelengths measure roughly 475 nanometers, whereas the warmest colour, red, measures about 650 nm. As light travels and energy dissipates, the colours we see can mark proximity.
So it makes sense to me that Albers’ (and others’) observation of phenomena around colour focuses on how they interact, modifying hue and light intensity, and ultimately impact the way an image is perceived. Our eyes deceive us—but if we can at least understand in what ways this is true, artists and designers can work with it.
Of course, I haven’t even touched on palettes, cultural markers of colour, the history of colour, or how film in colour has been developed and how desirably qualities arose both intentionally and unintentionally, for example. There are reams of books about these things and I’m personally looking forward to a lifetime of investigating this stuff.
Today, it’s just a thought about colour as a contributor to the spatial composition of a photo, and how it can be used to balance—or counterbalance—its other elements.