Point
and Shoot
July
6 2020
Point
and shoot photography
captures
the world
just
as it is,
full
spectrum light
entering
the camera
and
reproducing itself.
But
in the photographic arts
what
arrests the eye
is
black and white.
Because
our visual sense
is
grateful to rest
in
degrees of grey.
Because
contrast is powerful
and
seems to freeze time.
The
permanence, and gravitas
of
black and white
that
becomes, somehow, iconic.
And
because as fiction is truer than fact
black
and white can reveal more
than
a bright simulacrum
of
actual life.
Just
as the truly colourblind
who
see only in monochrome
own
the night,
low
light creatures
like
big-eyed primates
and
ambush cats.
Who
knew
one
could be disadvantaged
by
perfect sight;
the
distraction of colour
fear
of the dark.
The
glamorous skylines
of
eternal cities
that
exist only on film.
The
haunting gaze
of
people who felt
their
souls might be robbed.
The
forgotten and gone.
The
forever anonymous.
These
are depression photographs by Dorothea Lange. Little could illuminate
my reference to iconic imagery more than these.
Achromatopsia
(which was the original title of this piece) is a hereditary
condition of true colour blindness. It's not that achromatopes
are missing a single colour receptor. It's that their retinas have no
cones, and so they can see only in black and white. But there is a
trade-off here. They see better in the dark. And because the rods
that populate the outer reaches of the eye are more acute, they have
better peripheral vision, and are probably more sensitive to motion
as well. They say in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
But there actually is an island of achromatopes, and there
they have evolved a way of life that may, counter-intuitively,
actually put the fully visioned at a disadvantage.
Oliver
Sacks popularized this small unique group in his 1997 book Island of
the Colorblind. Here's a link to an article from the New Yorker
that elaborates on this.
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