Color Interaction and the Color Photograph

When I began photographing in the late 1960s, within the first month, I knew I had to work in color. I believed that color was necessary to render the seasonal and atmospheric effects that had impelled me to photograph in the first place ^{fig. 2}.

I did not make this decision idly: I had carefully photographed several scenes in the landscape in color and then in black-and-white, printed them, and compared the results.

Over the years, I have come to believe that my decision was not necessarily correct: Many photographs made in “black and white” by Robert Adams stir me viscerally ^{fig. 3}. I believe the difference lies in the ability of black and white to render fractional gradations of light. ^[1]

But the decision was made, and then I faced a problem I’ve yet to fully answer for myself: what are the aesthetic principles of the photograph in color, its highest and its most powerful uses?

In time I came to a formulation: in the good or successful color photo- graph, the definition or the meaning of the picture will somehow arise through the use of color. (In ^{figure 1} the passenger in the 1957 turquoise Thunderbird has managed to find sunglasses that precisely match the color of the car. We can speculate about why she has done so—and what it means to her and her co-occupant. In the answer to these questions lies the punctum of the picture)

However, this formulation did not solve the question of the overall chromatic structure of the picture. In those days, the painters that I knew relied upon color theory as articulated by Josef Albers in his teaching at Yale and his deeply valued Interaction of Color ^{fig. 4}. So I set out to investigate what use, if any, Albers’ ideas, or those of the many other color theorists who taught at the Bauhaus, such as Kandinsky or Itten or Klee, could be to the nascent art of color photography. I even read Goethe and Steiner.

Whenever I saw a color phenomenon in the landscape that somehow coincided with an Albers-type exercise in the perceptual properties of color, I made a photograph.

These experiments heightened my awareness of the rich color passages occurring each day ^{fig. 5 fig. 6}, but they did not lead me to any globalized theory of color photography.

This was to change through circumstance. I had been working in Nags Head, on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, doing my first sustained seasonal body of work. At the time, I was facing a medical problem that had the potential to leave me paralyzed from the shoulders downward. Delaying surgery, I had come to Nags Head, an old beach town floating in time, seeking a sense of temporal and spatial fluidity, a sense of oneirism ^{fig. 7 fig. 8}.

After about six weeks of intense work, my idyll was broken by a phone call: my brother Gabriel had died in an automobile accident in Colorado. I returned to New York; I never went back to Nags Head. Two out of my three brothers were now gone.

Eventually, I wanted to work: one day, I decided to go to the beach in Rockaway. It was one of those uneasy days that can come in late August when the summer knows it must end.

I walked in a direction I would not usually take: it led me to a district of large, unsightly apartment buildings by the sea. A strong wind blew, the scene looked hellish through my tear-filled eyes.

And then something happened: a different sense came over me, a heightened color awareness engendered by all the looking at the thought I had given to color. At once, the ugly scene appeared beautiful to me. The hues of the sand and the apartments were the perfect complement to the dusty blue of the sky. Seemingly disparate parts fused into a coherent whole. I made a photograph ^{fig. 9}. A Japanese concept refers to a moment when the doors of perception open and one engages in "clear seeing in a clear light." That was such a moment for me.

At the time, I had no way of knowing it, but that photograph, made in despair, would eventually shape my entire practice.

It began two and a half years later when I received a Guggenheim Fellowship. Even though it had been awarded to continue a series of street photographs, I decided to do what I had always wanted to do: follow the seasons across America.

In preparation, I bought a Volkswagen camper and a wooden 8 x 10 view camera. I also reviewed my previous work to find the image that held me the most. The answer was the beach scene made under painful circumstances on that August afternoon.

I tried to analyze its formal properties. It was composed of two or three dominant hues—most importantly, of equal density. There were no primaries.

I thought of the work of the Bauhaus colorist Paul Klee and, to a lesser extent, the watercolors made by Auguste Macke in Tunisia, where the two had traveled ^{fig. 10}.

I set about testing film and equipment to achieve that aesthetic consistently ^{fig. 11}. Lenses for large-format cameras are said to vary as much as human personalities: every weekend that summer, I rented three different lenses, drove to the country, and photographed the same scene with each one. I tried to make real pictures at seven dollars for a film sheet.

After much testing, I chose the lens with the color characteristics and contrast I needed. I also chose a film (Kodak Type S) that was lower in contrast and more delicate in color rendition, albeit slightly less sharp, than other films. And when it came to printing the work, I made a similar choice concerning papers.^[2]

I went through these efforts not only because I found this color effect transporting but also because I had come to believe that it was an essential element in achieving the intention of the work.

The social historian Lewis Mumford theorized that eras may have characteristic color schemes. Perhaps the most obvious example of Mumford’s thesis is the Industrial Revolution, which is remembered as being stovepipe black. Although he referred to the period from 1865, when Lincoln died, to the opening of the Great Chicago Exposition in 1895 as the “Brown Period.”

I came to believe the pastel hues of the aesthetic I was working to achieve were characteristic of a new pseudo-sophisticated America of high-tech and lattes on every corner emerging in the late 1970s and early ‘80s.

But the real work of achieving this aesthetic came in the choice of scene and subject matter to be photographed and in the light in which they were photographed. I worked to find scenes that had meaning within the sense of America that I had—and the formal properties that permitted a joining of form and context.

Working at the rate of two negatives a day, all my Guggenheim and my sabbatical from teaching afforded me, I had to be precise in what I wanted to say and what said it best. I story-boarded in my diary in the Volkswagen camper, usually at 2 am when I couldn’t sleep, while “camping” in a motel parking lot.

Because I could only FedEx the film to New York for processing every so often, there was often a two or three-month lag before I saw contacts. I couldn’t afford to contact everything.

Ansel Adams believed he was doing well if he made one good photograph a month, but I didn’t know that then. I often found myself thinking I was failing, disgracing myself.

To build a bridge to my life as a failure, I imagined what I would do next. The fantasy that recurred most often was that I would open a Tex-Mex café on a back street in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Why Ft. Wayne? It sounded good to me: I’ve never been there. I would to be an unknown from an unknown, a true sense of anomie.

The cafe would be a favorite place for long-haul truckers to stop. I would be the chef in the back with my chef’s hat pulled down low over my eyes lest anybody recognize color photography’s poster boy for failure.

I went so far in my imagination as to work out the decor of the place: it was going to have pale hospital green walls, and in the front window, there would be a little ceramic donkey pulling a cart out of which was growing a cactus, a cactus that only a mother cactus could love.

Of course, the wall’s green and the cactus cart’s complementary magenta would be of equal density.