I
The challenge lies in learning to gain trust in a new relationship. There’s something that happens to the psyche when color is quieted, stripped, drained. The eye searches for something that can fit its template of predictable comforts, but that degree of familiarity is hard to find in a grayscale world. You either compromise on a specific thing you’re looking for, find something better than what you were looking for, or search with no purpose but wow was that a good find. All of that simmering reduces the challenge to this: to accept that color is not a completion.
II
Which color (not black) is so saturated that in grayscale will render as black? Which color (not white) is so brilliant that it will render as white? In a colored photo, why do some shadows photos render as shy gauze, but when in grayscale look darker than a black hole? This occurred to me when a bold red in a full-color photo suddenly acted reticent when I applied a black and white filter. But don’t we do that, too? We sometimes surprise ourselves when put in an entirely new context. One person can drain you of your essence, while another can enhance it. Standing in one room can strip you of your inhibitions, while standing in another makes you want to pile on more layers. We can gaze in absolute awe at a majestic panorama and feel small, while remembering we are gargantuan to ants. The latter is the rare quality of a color that seems to behave the same no matter the setting or filter, but I’d be willing to bet that kind of balance is rare.
III
This spectrum is a matte mirror. I don’t find it a coincidence that the word “exposure” is used in photography. How much [light] do we let in, and for how long? Both the object and observer fall prey to the camera’s uncanny ability to to be a revelatory sage. So who is capturing whom? It feels a bit like jumping into an intense relationship with a stranger.
Nice to meet you.
What’s your name?
Now tell me your deepest secrets.
IV
Why don’t the colors in this spectrum have names? Charcoal, slate, graphite, metals, and shiny minerals are specific, but calling something “dark” or “light” gray feels lazy and weak. Perhaps herein lies a clue: to search for a name is to search for a meaning. The quest churns up old clichés. Indecision, neutrality, uncertainty, ambiguity. But what if being unnamed is the point? Is this range of hues simply beyond meaning, meta-? Or maybe there’s no meta- about it and grayscale really is as nebulous as it projects itself to be. Nameless because we don’t understand it. Complex, faceless, incomprehensible. Tension resides in all of this ambiguity, which could also be argued lends depth to the relationship.
And so that tension is ever-present. These unfathomable shadows. To fathom is to sound and to sound is to pronounce and to pronounce is to sharpen to clarify to highlight to elucidate and lucidity is light. But un- is to set in reverse like untying laces, walking backwards, balloons deflating, raindrops ascending, puddles de-splashing, breath returning to the lungs, deleting. See how un- draws the shadow from behind that light? And yet despite that light, the shadow that outlines it remains unnamed and a mystery.
V
Enough, generosity, completion without color. I found myself looking for shadows, as if the light wasn’t enough. I found myself looking for light, as if the shadows weren’t enough. I’ve already theorized that color isn’t a completion, but neither is light, neither is shadow. In a world of color it’s easy to show that yes, today was a sunny day. But in this other world, black and white aren’t so generous. You have to recruit clues that divide light from darkness. The black and white poles that birth it are decisive. But gray?
Colors behave as humans do. Or, at least, the way our eyes assign them to. Hold one color up against the other, you see how they pulse, blend, or retract. Hue against nuanced hue. The red object is still red, it hasn’t changed. But wearing the superlative idontknow of color, it and the colors around it behave as if they’re away from their parents for the first time. Indecisive, overconfident, and shy, all at the same time. That’s not a bad thing. It just means that in this relationship I have to be the generous one to understand that. Maybe that’s what the completion is.
