Colour and Photography
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.54103/2039-9251/18550Abstract
Do black-and-white and colour photography really represent two different and complementary expressive languages? Or is one merely a mirror of the other, in that we 'see' colours even where they are apparently not present? Our brain reconstructs them even in their absence: cones and rods in the retina operate simultaneously and not alternately, and visual memories influence the decoding of shades of grey in a chromatic key.
Black and white are nothing more than the two (unreachable) extremes of a continuum and are therefore fully part of our coloured world. All the various, unnamable as they are in fact indiscriminate, hues contain the so-called achromatics that delimit, both perceptually and psychologically, the space of colour and our way of relating to it.
References
Arnheim, R., Perché sono brutti i film a colori?, in “Scenario”, V/3, marzo 1936, pp. 112-114.
Barthes, R., La camera chiara: nota sulla fotografia, tr. it. di R. Guidieri, Einaudi, Torino 1980.
Ėjzenštejn, S. M., Il colore (1982), a cura di P. Montani, Marsilio editore, Venezia 2001.
Frova, A., Luce colore visione, Editori Riuniti, Roma 1984.
Ghirri, L., Lezioni di fotografia, a cura di G. Bizzarri e P. Barbaro, Quodlibet, Macerata 2010.
Kelly, K. L., Dictionary of Color Names, University of Michigan Library, Ann Arbor 1976.
Sacks, O., L’isola dei senza colore, tr. it. di I. Blum, Adelphi, Milano 1997.
Wittgenstein, L., Osservazioni sui colori, tr. it. di M. Trinchero, Einaudi, Torino 1982.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
The authors who publish in Itinera are required to accept the following conditions:
1. The authors retain the rights on their paper and lincese the journal the right of first publication. The paper is also licensed under a Creative Commons License, which allows others to share it, by indicating intellectual authorship and its first publication in Itinera.
2. Authors may adhere to other non-exclusive license agreements for the distribution of the published version of the paper (ex. deposit it in an institutional archive or publish it in a monograph), provided that its first publication in Itinera is indicated.
3. Authors can disseminate their paper online (ex. in institutional repositories or on their website) before and during the submission process, since this can lead to productive exchanges and increase quotations of the published work (See “The Effect of Open Access”).