On being a colorblind artist

What you see and what I see are not the same. But neither of us knows exactly where the difference lies.

Being colourblind means experiencing colour as compressed, contingent and frequently wrong by consensus standards. Some colourblind people have never seen red the way you see red. We don’t know this because we compared experiences, but because tests told us.

Colourblindness is, plainly, a deficiency. Something in the eye is missing or altered, and colour is seen less finely or not at all. Red-green colourblindness affects roughly 8 percent of men and 0.5 percent of women.[1] It is not a different opinion about colour. It is less information.

I have spent years watching people react to colours I had already moved past. My colourblindness compresses certain parts of the spectrum. Reds shift toward brown. Some greens disappear into others. Where a normally sighted person might distinguish a hundred shades of red, I see perhaps five. For some colours I have learned the correct names. I know that some of my blues are actually green and that some of my whites are actually pink, and I can say the right word. But the word is a correction applied afterwards, not a different way of seeing. I adjusted myself to the visual system, and the system did not change to meet me.

That is what interests me: if my perception is the deficient one, who defined normal? And what does that definition protect? The hundred shades are not the truth of colour either. They are a larger sample of something that no single body can take in whole. My colourblindness does not overturn the standard, but it makes the standard visible as a standard.

It also reveals something true about all perception: that it is partial, embodied, and shaped by a particular nervous system in a particular body at a particular moment. Everyone sees from somewhere. Most people are never asked to account for it.

The Boundaries of Language on Colour

Language has limits. Sometimes we cannot find the words to describe something, and words are shaped by culture in turn.

Russian, for example, makes a mandatory distinction between light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy). Where English or Dutch speakers see shades of one colour, Russian treats them as two separate categories. In a study from 2007, Russian speakers were faster at telling apart colours that fell on opposite sides of this linguistic boundary than colours within the same category.[2]

Even when a language has two colour words, their use does not necessarily follow the boundaries we expect. In Japanese, ao is usually translated as blue and midori as green. Yet a green traffic light is called ao. Colour categories, it turns out, are not a direct translation of an object’s physical properties. They are shaped by linguistic history and cultural convention.[3]

Language decides how we divide colour into categories, but the eye decides what we can tell apart in the first place. The Russian and Japanese examples concern the first. My own experience concerns the second. Both shape what we call colour: an interplay between physical stimulus, the visual system, language and learned categories.

This suggests that colour is not only something we perceive, but something we learn to distinguish and name. A colour word can help us communicate an experience, but it gives us no access to someone else’s direct experience. When two people look at the same surface and both say it is blue, we still do not know whether their experiences are identical. Shared language can create the impression that experiences coincide, but it does not prove it.

So which experiences disappear from our images when we try to fit everything into standardised colour categories?

Back in the Studio

My two most recent series grew out of these questions.

In Failure of reference, photographs are reduced until almost nothing identifiable remains. What is left are abstract areas of colour, and each work is titled with the colour names I see, for example: Sample 001: purple, brown and orange. The titles read like answers, but they are given from my perspective only. I cannot see what you see, and agreement in language proves nothing about experience. The works keep the form of evidence and withhold the means to check it. They are not an invitation to debate who sees what, or how our perceptions differ. They are a record of what I see.

Afterimage turns toward the body instead. The blur in these artworks are not a failure but a trace of a body moving through a place, a record of the seeing itself rather than of what was seen. Photography has long demanded the invisibility of the maker, but I think the maker is always visible. The angle, the crop and the stylistic choices are always personal. Everyone sees from somewhere, and here that somewhere is visible in every frame.

I don’t yet know how to fully explain, or show, what I see. In my ongoing research I try anyway. At first glance the works look abstract and might be mistaken for a painterly surface. Look closer and the ink of the photographic print becomes visible, and you may start to ask how the work was made. Only the title changes the perspective: it says purple, where you see a shade of blue. The distance between the title and the surface is the distance between what you see and what I see.

Sources

[1] Colour Blind Awareness, “Colour blindness” (colourblindawareness.org)
[2] Winawer, J. et al. (2007). “Russian blues reveal effects of language on color discrimination.” PNAS, 104(19), 7780-7785.
[3] Conlan, Francis (2003) “Searching for the Semantic Boundaries of the Japanese Colour Term ‘AO’”