DATE: 2/26/2013 | BY CORY REYNOLDS

Color, Liberated: James Welling

Featured image, "Farnsworth Steps" (2006), is reproduced from Aperture's new release, James Welling: Monograph. In the published conversation with Eva Respini, Welling delivers a beautiful explanation of his changing relationship to color: "A few years ago I started teaching a color seminar. I had become interested in how we see color—the phenomenon of color as a lived experience. My 2005 Hexachromes were a direct result of wanting to show how the three color receptors in our eyes work. I did this by photographing a stationary plant, and—as shadows moved across it—I made multiple exposures on the same piece of film, using red, green, blue, cyan, magenta, and yellow filters. When the shadows did not coincide, the additive and subtractive colors were made visible, creating a rainbow effect. I went to the Glass House thinking I would do the same, but there was no wind to produce moving shadows. So, I began to put overlapping filters in front of the lens. As I worked on the Glass House, the color became more vibrant. Interestingly, I kept seeing the bright colors of the photographs in my daily experience. I would print an unnatural orange or a purple, and I would go outside and see the same colors in a shadow or in a flash in the sky, or on a car. As I became sensitized to unnatural colors, I realized that they were not unnatural—I just hadn't noticed them. Becoming attuned to color has led me to think that we actually see more color than we normally perceive. I guess in some way I'm trying to liberate color."