I think over the past five years or so, I’ve been re-negotiating my relationship with colour.
Initially attracted to strong saturated colours, I found over the first decade of image making that my photography moved to a more muted palette. I assumed at the time that strong colour was the territory of the beginner, and as one becomes more attuned to working with contrasts and light, that a more subtle approach to the use of colour follows as well.
Although I think there is some truth in this, I’m not sure it’s entirely correct. Certainly, we do have to learn to use colour and in my own case I had to learn that simply having strong colours in the work did not always equate to a great image. Over the years of working on my tones and contrasts I found that use of colour can and should be used selectively. I just made the wrong assumption that as one starts to use less of it in certain work, that this was a trajectory. A simple one dimensional path towards colour reduction.
I’m not so certain of this now. Even though I think this is what happened to me for a while. A long while. Maybe around a decade.
Each year I felt as though the colour in my work was becoming less and less, and I assumed that this was simply a case that as one becomes a bit more adept at working their compositions, colour would become more subtle, much like how our use of contrasts in our work can become more nuanced over time. I remember my first few years of photography being in love with very contrasty work and thinking that the images looked weak if they had softer contrasts.
I then wrote an article about five years ago suggesting that I was getting a little bored of the muted look and that I was finding I was re-introducing colour (unconsciously) to my work. My theory at the time was that we tend to shift back and forth, much like a pendulum, from strong to muted colour and back again.
Now I think it’s more a case that I have an evolving, constantly changing relationship with colour, and have come to find myself being very comfortable with one portfolio having a lot of colour and another having almost none. Certainly, I’d love to think that this is more about skill: knowing when the use of strong colour is appropriate and equally, when it is not.
I’m just aware that some places are more monochromatic than others. Some cannot help but tell you that colour is a major feature of their makeup.
And I think I fought that, and I think we fight this all the time.
How we react to colour is often symptomatic of the places we choose to visit, and just as importantly, the places we choose to avoid.
”I much prefer the muted winter scapes” tells me more about the person than the actual landscape. It tells me that they have a preference for muted colours and will most likely visit places that provide that for them.
Similarly shooting only sunrises and sunsets, or perhaps even assuming that these are the best times of the day to shoot tells us that strong colour is our preference. And also, perhaps, that we are restricting ourselves to working in certain colour palettes by choice.
I think I’ve had a relationship with colour since I picked up my very first camera, and I didn’t know it. I’m at a stage now with what I do, that I try my best to approach each landscape more openly: “what is it telling me?”, as often the landscape tells us what it is. But we often place our own expectations upon it. Such as disappointment when the sunset didn’t happen. Rather than recognising that perhaps this evening it wasn’t supposed to be about the sunset anyway. More wintry, darker, monochromatic is how the landscape was. But we simply weren’t receptive to it.
I used to say: we need to submit to the landscape. For it will not submit to us. I didn’t really consider colour at the time. I thought colour was a choice. I’m not so sure now, and am finding that some of my more recent work is more colourful than other recent work. It’s more a case of knowing when the use of strong colour is appropriate, and when it’s not. Perhaps that is the skill?