Line Project Artist statement
response here
Color Response
This photograph is of my beautiful friend Marwang. He kneels down while looking at the camera and he wears diamonds on his face. The background was white but as I shot this, it looked more like blue. It was as if his vulnerability could visually be seen through this photograph and although half of his face is obscured in the image, his eyes aren’t. As Deana Lawson once said, “Eyes are the windows to the soul.” I wanted to capture the beauty and softness of black bodies because those elements are always stripped away from them. I wanted other black people to feel validated by my image and I felt that the best way to do that is by using blues in my image because the color blue is comforting, warm and accepting. Claire Lehmann In “Color Goes Electric,” mentions that what has been considered “synthetic, exaggerated, or natural” in color photography only reflects our preferences, our ideas about the desirability of a look. Lehmann also introduces a study Bartleson conducted that explains that humans use memory to distort the appearance of color which led to an objective system to measure color. Because of this, I perhaps drew the connection with black bodies with hues of blue because of a repressed memory. I associate this image with colors of blue, purple, brown and black. From reading color experts from color magazine, Lyn Hejinian talked about the color cyan. She describes it as “the color that emanates from a calm sea not far offshore on a clear day as the blue of the sky is reflected in saltwater awash over yellow sand” (Hejinian). I wasn’t surprised when she associated the color blue with the sea and the sky, its common really. The color blue is known to having a warm and calming effect on the psyche. I started to get look further into the color blue as it relates to blackness when I saw the movie “Moonlight.” Moonlight is about the journey of manhood. It deals with sex, survival, family, and masculinity in terms of blackness. I’ve always associated blackness with the color blue but it was always more of a feeling I couldn’t dissect. The movie “Moonlight” was the film that brought it to light for me. The color blue is an experience and ultimately it becomes a word easily associated with comfort and freedom. Blue and purple are closely related. Frances Richard talks about indigo. “Lovelorn blues with the sophisticated, liquid o’s and i’s and d’s of “Mood Indigo,”—in which a lilting “moon” is imbricated as if behind blue-black clouds’” (Richard, 26). The ocean, moon, and skylight often used to describe the color blue. Paul La Farge introduces a philosopher named Giorgio Agamben who introduces the idea that our eyes have the potential to see as well as the potential not to see. “‘The greatness—and also the abyss—of human potentiality is that it is first of all potential not to act, potential for darkness.’ Because we are capable of inaction, we know that we have the ability to act, and also the choice of whether to act or not. Black, the color of not seeing, not doing, is in that sense the color of freedom” (Farge, 154). The color black in this case can also be used as a form of resistance which is often the case. The color black was also used (in caves) by Native Americans that initiated their boys into manhood, “from their point of view the cave was a liminal space, between two stages of life, the one dissolved in darkness and the other not yet known” (Farge, 154). This part of the text surprised me because the movie “Moonlight” was also about bringing up a boy into manhood but instead of using a cave to form blackness, the blackness was on the boy’s skin. The use of color was crucial to the execution of the film. It was used as a form of symbolism because often, in the safety of the night, it was the only time black men could drop their guard and shed the overly masculine personas that they have to use every day to survive. It was in those moments that they became vulnerable. They became blue.