Published
There’s an irony in being someone who works with images and can’t see color “properly.” It’s probably why, for a while, I only worked in black and white. It wasn’t a decision, exactly—it just made things simpler. Less room for error. Fewer variables to pretend I understood.
Black and white was something I could hold. It made the world quiet. I didn’t have to guess.
Color, on the other hand, requires belief. It asks for trust—in other people, in memory, in context. It moves like heat and light as the sun rises. It arrives gradually, across the surface of things.
lt’s not sharp or articulate (unless we’re talking about primary colors: . Those, I can see.). Most of the time, it doesn’'t announce itself the way I imagine it does for other people. It seeps.
For me, color is more suggestion than certainty. It’s more like memory. Or temperature. It surrounds things. It hums in the background. It’s like walking into a room and knowing it’s warm without knowing what’s causing the heat.
Even now, I find myself looking for the coldest or warmest part of an image, just to orient myself. What’s blue? What’s red? Everything else feels ambient. Suspended.
What I can’t see, I’ve learned to ask about— that’s how these images were made. I don’t think that makes the images any less mine. Just less certain. And maybe more honest.
These photos were made in collaboration with my friend Demi Straulino. We had a hot afternoon and many ideas, apricots, and ice cubes. I wanted to make images of colors I couldn’t see, so she was our color guide as we composed each still life, and, as we edited, she letting me know when we’d lost pinks, or when something veered too green.
Where I felt for shape, she felt for color. She names what I can’'t name.
