Photography and Essay by Cig Harvey : A Color Manifesto
Deep inside our eyes, next to the dark velvet lake of the aqua vitreous, are cones and rods. The rods allow us to see in the gloaming, but only in grayscale. The cones are responsible for color, but they need light to work.
The camera sees things differently than our eyes do. This is the reason photographing at night is so addictive. The camera becomes the youthful eye. The camera is an owl. We are shown something outside of typical human perception.
We have three types of cone receptors in each eye: red, green, and blue. If you stare at a slice of red velvet cake for one minute and then look at a white wall, you will see that cake projected in a verdant bluish green. This is because your red cones are now exhausted. Certain animals have more cone receptors than humans do and can see well beyond our red-to-violet light spectrum. Butterflies have at least five kinds of cones. Mantis shrimp have as many as sixteen. This means that a mantis shrimp—an animal that lives in the shallows, not the deep—has the potential to see millions more variants of colors than humans do. Mantis shrimp practically speak color. A few people, primarily women, have four types of cones. These women are tetrachromats, so seeing color is one of their many superpowers. But some people, primarily men, only have two cone variations, making them blind to the color they are missing. If you are missing red, then a juicy strawberry appears beige. No wonder some men overcompensate.
Read the entire article on Virginia Quarterly Review’s website.