The colours are acts of light; its active and passive modifications
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Theory of Colours (1810)
The Interval
The Eyes Listen
White, Black, Grey: Why Red Matters
White, black, and grey are often treated as a settled scale: light, dark, and everything between. But colours do not carry fixed meanings from one setting to another. They gather meaning through material, language, memory, and use. Red matters here because it unsettles the scale, not as a universal symbol but as a colour that can make the image feel newly bodily, vivid, or implicated.
White, and the Shadow It Casts
There is no shadow without light, and no light without something to fall on and stop. A beam crossing an empty room touches nothing; it becomes visible at the wall, the dust, the body. Shadow is not light’s enemy. It is one of the conditions by which light becomes perceptible.
That relation is more complicated than the familiar arithmetic in which white means purity and black means its absence. In the physical world, white can describe light composed of many wavelengths, or a surface that reflects broadly across the visible spectrum; black can describe a surface that reflects very little. Neither account, by itself, tells us what a colour means in a culture, a photograph, or a life. The metaphor begins to fail as soon as it pretends to explain those things.
Pass white light through a prism and it separates into colours. White is not empty; it contains differences that ordinary seeing can gather into one impression. Language gathers, too. It wants a word for the whole, and words such as pure, clean, and neutral can make that whole sound innocent. But a total that includes many things is not automatically equitable: someone still decides what counts, what is named, and what can remain unseen.
There is no shadow without light, and no light without something to fall on and stop. A beam crossing an empty room touches nothing; it becomes visible at the wall, the dust, the body. Shadow is not light’s enemy. It is one of the conditions by which light becomes perceptible.
That relation is more complicated than the familiar arithmetic in which white means purity and black means its absence. In the physical world, white can describe light composed of many wavelengths, or a surface that reflects broadly across the visible spectrum; black can describe a surface that reflects very little. Neither account, by itself, tells us what a colour means in a culture, a photograph, or a life. The metaphor begins to fail as soon as it pretends to explain those things.
Pass white light through a prism and it separates into colours. White is not empty; it contains differences that ordinary seeing can gather into one impression. Language gathers, too. It wants a word for the whole, and words such as pure, clean, and neutral can make that whole sound innocent. But a total that includes many things is not automatically equitable: someone still decides what counts, what is named, and what can remain unseen.
Purity has histories that do not belong to white alone. In this project, red carries older and other associations with blood, covenant, and bodily marking; white’s claim to purity is therefore not a timeless fact but one strand in a changing symbolic history. The point is not to replace one universal colour dictionary with another. It is to ask who is using the colour, in what setting, and with what consequence.
The photographer learns this through exposure. A meter makes an estimate; it does not deliver an unmediated truth about the world. The resulting image depends on choices about light, surface, exposure, reproduction, and what the frame leaves out. The white of a page, a screen, or a blown highlight can look like neutral ground, but it is still a condition of seeing, and sometimes a limit on what can be seen.
Two accounts of darkness help me think about that limit. Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, in In Praise of Shadows (1933), finds beauty “not in the thing itself, but in the patterns of shadows” that things make against one another. Dimness there is not a lack to be corrected; it asks the viewer for time, and for return. Immanuel Kant’s account of the sublime, in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, moves differently. When the mind cannot take in an overwhelming scene as a whole, it turns toward its own capacity to think beyond what the senses can grasp. One stays with the object’s partial presence; the other makes the object an occasion for the mind’s self-discovery. Neither is simply right or wrong. But each raises a question of position: when does not seeing invite attention, and when does it expose someone to danger?
The distinction matters because obscurity is not the same experience for everyone. A mountain viewed from safety may produce awe; a body made invisible, misread, or overexposed by a social system encounters something else. The metaphor of light can illuminate that difference only if it does not make unequal consequences seem equivalent. I can write about whiteness as a visual condition and as a social category, but those registers carry different stakes, and they are not equally available to every writer or reader.
There is a white that removes: bleach stripping colour from cloth; an overexposed image in which detail disappears; a clean surface on which every mark becomes suspect. There is also a white that waits: blank paper before the first mark, a pause before a decision. The first may erase; the second may hold open possibility. Neither meaning is guaranteed by the colour itself. The useful question is not “Is white pure?” but “What does this particular white permit, and what does it remove?”
The colour chart that accompanies this project makes that question tangible. It offers many named near-whites (Bone White, Cloud, Antique White, White Smoke and others) alongside greys and darker tones. The samples are not simply neutral: each name borrows from a material, a place, a brand, a mood, or an imagined condition. Commercial colour naming turns subtle differences into purchasable choices. That is not a reason to dismiss it; it is a reason to look at it as both colour reference and language machine. Which differences does it help us notice? Which names make a colour feel natural, domestic, clean, aged, or desirable?
The chart also complicates the idea that naming merely labels a perception already complete. A name can guide attention; it can suggest what a shade resembles. But the chart does not prove that words determine what people can see. It shows, more modestly, how perception and naming meet in a particular designed object: a grid of samples, each offered as both a colour and a story.
I have often been drawn to the middle tones, where differences remain visible without announcing themselves as opposites. That preference is not automatically innocent. To remain comfortably ambiguous is easier when no urgent choice is being forced upon you. An image can keep contradictions open; a person living through their consequences may not have that luxury. The work must not confuse my aesthetic preference for suspension with a universal virtue.
A photograph is made of what passes through and what catches. White may seem to offer the lightest ground, but it is never simply outside the image. It sets the terms on which marks register. The question I want to leave open is not whether white is good or bad. It is what becomes visible when something interrupts its claim to neutrality, and who is asked to live in the resulting shadow.
Black, and What It Keeps
Light that meets a pale surface may be reflected toward the eye. A dark surface may absorb more of it. That physical description is useful, but it is not a moral account. Black is not evil because a material absorbs light, any more than white is innocent because it reflects it. Confusing those registers is one way a metaphor begins to pass itself off as nature.
Black has long been attached to material things: soot, char, ink, coal, dark soil, night. It can evoke what fire leaves behind, but it can also evoke what holds, shelters, or grows. The same word gathers different experiences, and none should be mistaken for the whole.
Some histories of black’s negative associations travel through religious, medical, and linguistic traditions. Mourning and penitential dress are one strand; older theories of black bile and melancholy are another; the name “Black Death” is a third, though it is a later label of disputed origin, echoing the Latin atra mors, a phrase Roman writers already used for death and plague, with ater, black, standing for the ominous.
The history of “black magic” is more complicated still. Part of it runs through the medieval Latin nigromantia, a form of necromantia (divination by consulting the dead) whose spelling was pulled toward the Latin word for black (niger); “black art” may have begun as a translation of it. A tidy story in which one altered spelling explains the whole metaphor would miss the other routes by which black entered the vocabulary of death and misfortune. These are specific histories to document carefully, not proof that black carries one shared meaning everywhere.
The stakes change when colour language is applied to people. The negative associations of black were not merely left to drift as harmless figures of speech; racial hierarchies made colour language part of systems that classified and devalued human beings. That history is not symmetrical with the history of white as a symbol, and it cannot be treated as one more pleasing register in an aesthetic inventory. I can name this as a limit on my position, not speak as if naming it gives me authority over other people’s experience.
Black is also a material vocabulary. Jet, ebony, raven, obsidian, ink, pitch, and char do not describe precisely the same black. Their names point toward things one can touch, burn, polish, or hold. Ebony is a case in point: the name suggests black, but on the chart the colour it labels is a dark grey-green. A colour chart extends this vocabulary in a different register: its samples and labels make darkness a catalogue of distinctions. Some names evoke materials; others borrow from places, objects, or moods. The chart invites close looking, but also turns colour into a commodity with a label and a place in a range.
The chart’s grid needs a caution of its own. A sample can be measured, named, and selected. A lived racialised experience cannot be made equivalent to a swatch. The chart may help show that “black” is not a single visual value; it must not be used to suggest that human histories are simply finer shades in a palette.
Ordinary experience includes more than one kind of black. First, pigment-black is a surface that returns little light. Second, the black of an empty night sky may come from the absence of a reflecting object in the direction we look. Third, in very low light, what we experience as black is shaped by the eye and brain as well as by the scene.
A fourth case lies outside ordinary experience altogether. In 2026, a team led by Ido Kaminer at the Technion reported direct measurements of optical phase singularities: points inside a light field where waves cancel, and the intensity falls to zero. Tracked with an ultrafast electron microscope, some of these points appeared to move faster than light just before they vanished. The word that matters is appeared. What moves is a pattern, not a thing, and the authors describe the result as a breakdown of the analogy that lets such points be treated as particles. Strictly, this is an absence of light rather than a colour: darkness with no surface, no pigment and no weight. It exists only as a relation among the light around it, and it ends when that relation does. I do not offer it as a metaphor for anything. Taken with the other cases, it loosens the idea that black is a single, simple absence. None of them settles its cultural meaning.
The black of soil can be fertile; the dark of a shelter can be protective. The black of a photograph can hold detail, or conceal it. The black of a screen can appear empty while waiting for an image. What matters is not to reverse the old moral hierarchy and declare black secretly good. It is to refuse the hierarchy’s premise that a colour has one moral nature.
This essay cannot make every register equally available for contemplation. Physics, pigment, and photographic tone can be handled as material questions. Blackness as a racialised condition is not mine to turn over in the same way. The honest move is to name that boundary, cite writers working from within the histories being discussed (Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks and Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark are two), and resist the urge to make a graceful metaphor where more careful listening is required.
A photograph needs both dark and light to make tonal differences legible. That does not make the histories attached to black and white equal or interchangeable. It means only that an image is built through relations: what reflects, what absorbs, what is recorded, what is lost, and who has the power to decide what the image means. Black keeps more than one history. No single essay can claim to keep them all.
Grey, and What It Postpones
We are taught to think in opposites: black and white, true and false, presence and absence. The pairs can be useful, but their clean edges may offer a sense of clarity before understanding arrives.
Grey is not simply a compromise between black and white. It changes with its neighbours, with the light, with the surface, and with the observer. The colour chart makes that variability visible in miniature: its greys shift among warm, cool, greenish, violet, metallic, and near-black impressions. The grid invites comparison, but the names do not settle what the eye sees. A shade called French Grey or Silver Fog arrives with a prompt, not a final interpretation.
In photography, grey is also a practical reference. Exposure systems estimate how a scene should be rendered; the familiar middle-grey reference is a convention for making that estimate, not proof that the world itself averages to grey. A camera does not simply capture the world as it is. It translates light through a device, a setting, a choice, and a reproduction process. Grey is one place where those choices become visible.
The same word has a philosophical life. In the preface to the Philosophy of Right, Hegel writes of philosophy painting its grey in grey: thought arrives once a form of life has grown old, able to be understood but not made young again. Adorno answers from inside that image. In Negative Dialectics, he says that consciousness could not despair over the grey if it did not harbour the concept of a different colour, whose scattered trace is not missing from the negative whole. Grey, read this way, is not neutral ground. We can recognise it as grey only because we can still imagine another colour. Hito Steyerl’s video Adorno’s Grey (2012) takes up the reported story that he asked for his lecture hall to be painted grey, and follows conservators scraping through the layers to find it. These accounts are not interchangeable, and neither turns grey into a universal ethical answer. They help name a tension: uncertainty can be attentive, or it can become an excuse not to act.
That tension matters in the work. To remain with ambiguity may mean refusing a false choice; it may also mean postponing a necessary one. “Grey” cannot absolve the viewer from judgment. It asks what the available evidence permits us to say, what remains unresolved, and who bears the cost of our hesitation. Primo Levi’s account of the “gray zone” in The Drowned and the Saved is the severest test of the word. Grey there names moral compromise under terror, a region where the line between victims and persecutors cannot be drawn cleanly, and it is not offered as a comfortable middle.
A grey surface does not always announce itself. Look longer, and small variations appear: a warmth beside a coldness, a tint that seemed absent, a shift in depth. The colour chart is especially useful here because it makes naming and looking happen together. Its commercial labels are not neutral descriptions; they bring associations into the encounter. But the chart’s sheer variety also resists the idea that grey is one dull midpoint. It becomes a field of choices and relationships.
Even the dark is not black to the eye. In total darkness, the visual system supplies a faint grey of its own, which German calls Eigengrau, “intrinsic grey”. It is perceived as lighter than a black object in ordinary light, because the eye responds more to contrast than to absolute brightness. Grey, then, is partly something the viewer supplies.
Much of the vocabulary used here is borrowed from sound: tone, scale, interval, key. The language of looking has long leaned on the other senses. The architect Juhani Pallasmaa argues in The Eyes of the Skin that architecture has privileged vision over the other senses and that this needs to change to make room for all of them, and in The Thinking Hand that understanding also comes through the hands, through making and building models. The same might be asked of the language of colour, which already listens more than it admits.
There is a grey of repetition, where differences are worn down into sameness. Photographers know it as flatness: a low-contrast print, or a scene metered toward the middle, where the tonal range collapses toward a single mid-tone. There is also a grey of emergence, where distinctions take time to become visible. The anthropologist Alan Smart, writing about practices that are not yet legal or illegal, borrows a darkroom image for the same idea: how grey a part of the scale ends up depends on how long it is allowed to develop. They are not two kinds of paint so much as two ways a viewer may encounter a surface. The same shade can be background in one setting and the subject of careful attention in another.
Perhaps this is why grey can feel close to memory. Memory is selective and incomplete; some details remain sharp while others fade or change each time they are recalled. Grey can suggest that condition, but it does not own it. A useful image is not a universal definition.
Black and white can frame a decision; grey can make its conditions more apparent. It does not resolve the tension between them, and it should not be asked to do so. Its invitation is more modest: look again, notice the relations, and distinguish uncertainty that deserves patience from uncertainty being used to avoid responsibility.
Red, and the Distance It Refuses
Red is often encountered as an event: a cut, a ripening fruit, a flame, a mark on a surface. But the event is not contained in the colour alone. What red means depends on what bears it, who sees it, and what histories enter the encounter.
In this project, red interrupts the black-and-white frame without becoming a universal answer to it. It can intensify a contrast, but it can also bind: blood, ceremony, warning, celebration, earth, exchange. These associations do not belong equally to every place or person. A red mark in one ritual is not interchangeable with a red mark in another.
Red can feel immediate because it is vivid and because many familiar red materials (blood, fire, ripe fruit, pigment) are consequential. Yet vividness is not the same as meaning, and a viewer’s physiological response is not a cultural interpretation. The work can invite bodily attention without claiming that every viewer feels the same thing.
A red mark can collapse distance, but it can also become spectacle.
To say that red implicates the viewer is a proposition the artwork has to earn. Scale, texture, location, and the relation between mark and image all matter. Does the red appear to have entered the image from outside? Does it belong to the surface, or sit on it? Does it call attention to a body, or convert the body into a sign?
The question of time matters too. A red pigment may remain bright; a stain may darken, spread, or fade. Blood changes as it dries, but a painted representation is not blood. The distinction is important: the work can refer to blood without pretending that a pigment carries the same material or ethical weight as a wound. In the image, red may be evidence of an event, an invented event, or a sign whose cause cannot be known.
Red is sometimes described as an early basic colour term; Brent Berlin and Paul Kay’s Basic Color Terms (1969) is the usual source for that account, and it has been contested. Such models are useful as broad proposals about patterns in language, not as a ladder that every culture climbs in the same order. The fact that red is prominent in some naming systems does not settle what red means in any particular artwork.
My work lifts, transfers, and remediates images. The image changes in that passage; memory is not a fixed original retrieved intact. Red can become a trace of that change: present on the surface, then subdued, transferred, or absent but still anticipated. It may mark not only what happened, but the distance between an event and its later image.
In relation to grey, red offers a different kind of time. Grey may hold tonal differences after contrast softens; red may signal a shift as it happens. This is not a colour code. It is a way to think about the work’s sequence: impact, attention, residue. A red mark may fade into the tonal field, or make the field newly visible.
The question is not whether red means life or danger, rupture or connection. It can carry several associations at once, and those associations may conflict. The more useful question is what this red does here: what it touches, what it interrupts, what it leaves behind, and what the viewer is being asked to assume.
White, black and grey measure light, and together they can seem a settled scale. Red can enter it from elsewhere and bring in what that measuring leaves out: a body, an event, a viewer close enough to be implicated. That is why red matters here, and why the scale stays open.
An Unfinished Arrangement
The words above were written in the company of others. The thinking is not solitary; the ideas are shaped by those who have come before. What you are reading are conversations between myself, my work, and wider fields of thought. In Roland Barthes’ words, the text is a “tissue of quotations,” even when those quotations remain unspoken.
References and Reading
Adorno, Theodor W., Negative Dialektik (1966); Negative Dialectics.
Art in Context. “Ebony Color.” artincontext.org/ebony-color/.
Berlin, Brent, and Paul Kay. Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969.
D’Irsay, Stephen. “Notes to the Origin of the Expression ‘Atra Mors.’” Journal and year to be confirmed (doi 10.1086/358397).
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks (Peau noire, masques blancs, 1952).
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Theory of Colours (1810), Preface. Translated by Charles Lock Eastlake, 1840. Project Gutenberg ebook 50572.
Hegel, G. W. F. Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820/21), Preface.
Kaminer, Ido, et al. “Superluminal correlations in ensembles of optical phase singularities.” Nature 651, 920–926 (2026).
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), Analytic of the Sublime.
Levi, Primo. The Drowned and the Saved (1986). New York: Summit Books, 1988.
Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.
Pallasmaa, Juhani. The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses (1996).
Pallasmaa, Juhani. The Thinking Hand: Existential and Embodied Wisdom in Architecture (Wiley, 2009).
Online Etymology Dictionary. Entries for “necromancy” and “black magic.” etymonline.com.
Smart, Alan. “Anthropological shades of grey: Informal norms and becoming (il)legal.” Plenary paper, “Norms in the margins of the state” conference, Brussels, November 2012.
Steyerl, Hito. Adorno’s Grey. Video installation, 2012.
Tanizaki, Jun’ichirō. In Praise of Shadows (1933). Translated by Thomas J. Harper and Edward G. Seidensticker. New Haven: Leete’s Island Books, 1977.