Sometimes, although I can see color, I can also, looking at the same subject, see it in black and white, or at least faded color. I don’t do anything with my eyes – it is all in my brain. You’d be surprised how many days there are when the colors are muted, varying shades of gray and black and white.
At the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, there is an exhibit of hundreds of shoes that survive from victims of the gas chambers. In that instance, all of the color has leeched out of the shoes, and all you can see is ash gray, in varying degrees of intensity. One has to superimpose color onto them, to imagine what they looked like seventy years ago, when people wore them on their feet, or they were strewn about a house, alive with people’s daily routines. That is much harder for me to do. Did the shoes all turn gray at the same time, or did it happen haphazardly? Was there any prematurity? Was there something more at work than just the aging of the shoes? For example, why are Dorothy’s ruby red slippers (just down the Smithsonian Mall in the Museum of American History) still vibrant after all of these years? They were made in the 1930’s, 10 years before the holocaust. I realize they are preserved carefully in a museum – is that what makes the difference?
I’m looking at a picture of the Shentou Number 2 power plant spewing fly ash and coal dust over the countryside near Shuozhou, China. The picture could have been taken with black and white film, but I suspect I am wrong. This is what happens when ash and coal cover grass and buildings and trees. The only color, faint though it may be, is the pale dusky pink sky. Perhaps it is sunrise. There is an area of brightness about twenty degrees above the horizon, implying it is either the beginning or the ending of the day, but there are no definite outlines, just a brighter blot behind an opaque curtain.
There are no humans or wildlife in the picture, but smoke is billowing out of two thin stacks, suggesting the presence of people who stoke them up.
A slight wind must be blowing because the smoke is curling in a specific direction to the right, behind the industrial buildings. If you just concentrate on the ash clouds themselves, you might find them ethereal and lazy, like the smoke that curls out of a cup of morning coffee.
A world without color conjures up another time, not the here and now, perhaps long ago when photography was in its infancy, or perhaps in the future when humankind has so polluted the world that color can not penetrate anymore … only faint wisps of what used to be.