Color as "a richer band of feelings"
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High Thought is an intimate infusion of (high) thoughts that are a mixture of frivolous and (sometimes) profound if I’m lucky. Written with consideration for those interested in the creative process or personal peek behind the curtain into a particularly chaotic brain room.
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🌸 Good morning/afternoon/evening, depending on where you are in the world. : )
Cape Light
I pulled a book I love off the shelf the other day. A floppy old paperback called Cape Light by one of my favorite 20th-century greats, Joel Meyerowitz.
These variations on a theme
are very nice.
Light is so crazy (genius to say) and the sky takes so many forms.
I love this picture so much. The horizon line and the top of the chair…the perfect pinkish red jacket resting perfectly on top of both. Those colors and that balance of the horizon line is dopamine spitting somewhere deep, deep in my brain.
So seventies. Everyone is wearing rich, beautiful jewel tones. A gorgeous party palette to shoot. Lucky Joel.
It’s not easy to get light to look this way on film. Idk how to put it. But the light spilling on the field in the background is at least a stop difference in my view from the bottom of the picture yet the figure feels so accurately rendered in the softer light. The yellow in the shirt is such a nice counterweight to the sky and the gold of the dirt in back. Red is my weakness. Red, to me, belongs in almost every picture. What a crazy thing to say. I say dumb things like that all the time, I just really really REALLY love red in pictures.
This Cumberland Farms picture’s greens reminds me of one of my favorite diCorcia photos from Hustlers:
Dusk is sublime in real life and in photos. One of my favorite learnings in photography was shooting with fill flash at dusk, when the sky and your light source are perfectly balanced. It doesn’t last long, but it’s so pleasing when it hits just right. Equilibrium/dopamine spitting.
Shooting at night and in the dark is underrated.
Anyway,
A picture that I love that isn’t pretty. This coffee table is so ugly. But it works perfectly in this picture. The color of the sand matching the frame and the water matching the glass. The type of picture I’d skip over if I were flipping quickly but it’s just perfect. I imagine the coffee table wants so badly to be the ocean and sand, literally from whence it came. Nope, it’s just an ugly ass coffee table made pretty only by this picture.
Another picture one might flip past quickly. But those shutters and the light coming in and buttering over the bevels and formations in the wall. The striations of silt from over the years mimicking the columns and horizontal lights of the shutters.
An anomaly in the book for me but I love this picture. The shadow, the highlights in her face showing the heat of the day, the swimsuit tanline, Joel’s own shadow. I love it.
The last several pictures did not have any red and yet they’re great. Contradiction is so fun and we must surrender to it to be free.
In the front of the book there’s some interview text which I hadn’t read before.
I like a few of the ways he describes things. Like why he moved from black and white to color and the feeling of being compelled to take a picture as “something that you can't quite handle that possesses you.”
As a neurodivergent, synesthetic, on-sensory-spectrums person…color really is a sensation to me. “Color plays itself out along a richer band of feelings - more wavelengths, more radiance, more sensation.” Perhaps it’s that combined with my deeply Taurus POV that I want it all to be rich, indulgent, challenging (!!!) and knocked backward by color, even monochrome subjects shot on color film scream about color’s absence in a way reinstates its importance through subtlety.
I love learning about how artists feel color or light or whatever it is that knocks them over. Photography is also a deeply, deeply solitary medium for the most part. We spend a lot of time looking, thinking, looking, reflecting, tweaking, looking, getting lost in pictures. I’ve been reading a bit about world-building recently and in some ways, pictures are little worlds proposed by a photographer for some reason or many.
A little tower of things I have saved on my computer:
I really, really appreciate it.
Have a good weekend, freaks! 😈
Cait 🌸
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I worked for Joel for several years and learned everything I know about photography by listening to him talk and getting to pour over his stacks and stacks of contact prints. Such a master of subtlety and color!
Loved this post, Cait. Thank you!