Week 13

Assignment:

Well I’m not sure of ‘pre’ or ‘post product’ but I understand vibrant color and monochrome. At least I thought I understood monochrome. In my mind ‘monochrome’ had always meant black and white, a binary choice of white and black. However monochrome just means one color, so one could make a painting with just the color blue and be famous! Like this:

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Yves Klien painted this ‘untitled Blue Monochrome’ back in 1959!

Monochrome as applied to black and white photography seems odd because when I look at a B&W print, I see two colors, the black and White! However technically, black is the absence of color so a monochrome print is just white and the absence of white. So could one paint or print with no color at all? What would that be called? AntiChrome? NadaChrome? ZilchoChrome? Actually it’s called Achromatic, and yes you can become famous doing it:

Ad Reinhardt Abstract Painting No. 5 1962
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Presented by Mrs Rita Reinhardt through the American Federation of Arts 1972 Courtesy of Tate

Some people are too clever. How to become famous by painting nothing! All kidding aside there is some thought put into this. As Ad Reinhardt was one of the leading protagonists in the New York art scene, of minimalism in painting and they experimented with monochrome color studies. He explained his black abstract painting thus: “As an artist I would like to eliminate the symbolic pretty much, for black is interesting not as a color but as a non-color and as the absence of color.”

I of course was not a smart as Mr. Reinhardt. Because I also created works of art that are completely black, but I never thought to send it in to an exhibition, and thus never became famous. And I created mine effortlessly by either forgetting to remove the lens cap, or accidentally advancing the film an extra frame. So I have several originals that look just like Ad’s painting. Hmmm.

Well the assignment was to produce vibrant color, not the absence of it. So I had to come up with something more than just burned toast smeared across cotton weave. What I first thought was, simple objects with vibrant color, and how to photograph that as one color, but nothing clicked so to speak. Next I thought of my colored filters that I used in the analog days of black and white photography. Modern black and white film for the most part is panchromatic, i.e. it is sensitive to all of the visible colors. This characteristic was unlike the old films of the 1800’s and early 1900’s that were only sensitive to blue light. If you look at very old photographs, you will notice that the skies will be mostly just white because the blue sky was very ‘bright’ to the film.

Now days with panchromatic films, you could use filters to adjust how different colors are recorded on film. For example, if you used a yellow filter over the camera lens, this would reduce the blue light passing into the camera, the effect would be to darken the blue sky and make the clouds stand out. If you went even farther, you could put a red filter over the camera lens, and this would really darken the blue skies almost to black. The red filter would make the clouds really stand out, (of course you don’t get something for nothing, the red filter will darken green foliage, which might make your print muddy looking).

With that thought, I grabbed my red filter found an adapter to put it on a lens, and started playing around with different subjects. I finally settled on the kitchen light, and loaded the image into the computer and played around with the color. This is the one I liked the most, I pushed the color well into the violet! but it still has a dominate color and is vibrant!