On Color

by David Kastan

  We do know, however, that the woman later felt betrayed by the photograph. In an article in the Los Angeles Times in 1978, when she was at last identified as Florence Owens Thompson, she said: “I didn’t get anything out of it. I wish she hadn’t of taken my picture. … She didn’t ask my name. She said she wouldn’t sell the pictures. She said she’d send me a copy. She never did.”18

  Lange’s memories were different: “I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions.” But she “seemed to know,” said Lange, “that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it.”19

  This may be what every photojournalist thinks—what every photojournalist must think. But whatever “sort of equality” there was here (and without doubt Lange overestimated it), the picture is deeply affecting, however much it might be exploiting the vulnerability of its subject and however hard it is obviously working to be affecting.

  The gray scale is part of that effort (not that Lange had a real choice in 1936). The organization of the sharp contrasts of her black and white are one of the striking formal facts of the portrait. The effect would be different in color. And we unconsciously register that difference as we look back at the photograph. Color would individualize what the grays universalize. Color would make specific what the grays have made “immortal.” And once immortal, the poignant family scene exists outside of history, outside of the reach of any reform that it might have been intended to spur.

  Color might produce a politics, whereas the grays now solicit mainly our sentimentality. The original photograph was designed to do both, but it can’t any longer. It isn’t merely that the Great Depression is now behind us, so that any political response is now irrelevant. If we know anything these days, it is that the poor are always with us and always suffer. The image could be of a migrant family at a refugee camp today in too many desperate places around the world. It is specifically that the gray scale now locates and seals this portrait in a past, leaving us only with its formal autonomy. This allows or even encourages either a purely aesthetic response or a predictable emotional one, annulling its own political ambitions. Surely this explains why James Agee thought that it “might not be a bad idea” for Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, that remarkable record of Depression sharecropper families in the American South, with his text and Walker Evans’s black-and-white photographs, to be printed on newspaper stock, since it “would crumble to dust in a few years.”20 This would have been perhaps the only way to prevent the inevitable aestheticization of the images, which in fact has occurred.

  Look at another Migrant Mother, a picture taken on the Greek island of Lesbos in 2016, as thousands of migrants fled the chaos of the Middle East, traveling from any number of war-torn countries to Turkey and then hoping to make their way to somewhere in Europe.

  Doug Kuntz’s Migrant Mother comes from the same impulse as Lange’s photograph to record and to witness, from the same awareness that suffering should not be ignored and should be alleviated—and from the same understanding of the compositional and iconographic resources available from many thousands of images of the Madonna and Child. This mother’s wide-eyed anxiety instead of Lange’s mother’s narrow slits of wary exhaustion suggests that this mother is relatively new to the burdens of dislocation and vulnerability. Her earrings (or maybe it is only the one we can see) are still in place, her mascara has run but must have been relatively recently applied, and she is wearing a brightly colored scarf. Her children look well fed. The Mylar warming blankets announce both her recent arrival on Lesbos and the presence of aid workers to greet her.

  FIGURE 44: Doug Kuntz, Migrant Mother, 2016

  The point isn’t that one photo is better than the other (though Kuntz’s work should certainly be better known) or that one mother has suffered more or longer and is therefore more deserving of our concern. It is that color here says that our concern might still matter, that this scene exists in a “now” that has many possible futures, whereas black and white says, to us anyhow, that it exists in a “then” that can have no future at all. Once gray no longer has to be the color standing in for all the colors that photography was unable to reproduce, it becomes the color only of a past cut off from the flow of time.

  But sometimes gray is only gray. Here’s the work of another too-little-known contemporary photographer: Ursula Schulz-Dornburg (Fig­ure 45).

  Dornburg has been making extraordinary pictures for several decades. (“Making,” not “taking,” is almost always the right verb for photography.) She has various series of photographs, all in black and white, usually images of once-purposeful buildings—bus stops and train stations—now uninhabited and poignantly testifying both to human enterprise and to entropy. She focuses on the interplay of architecture and landscape. The pictures provide evidence both of what resists time and of what is lost to it: evidence, that is, of both desire and decay.

  FIGURE 45: Ursula Schulz-Dornburg, Abandoned Ottoman Railway Station (#28), 2003, From Medina to Jordon Border, Saudi Arabia series, Tate Collection

  Color would be wrong in these pictures. Too distracting. Or maybe, in fact, too satisfying. The narrow band of gray tones without any sharp graphic contrasts registers everything that matters here, withholding even the comfort (or maybe it would be the mockery) of a clear blue sky. Color would be too noisy. Gray is not the sound of silence but its color.

  The scene demands the silence of its midtone grays: an isolated building now uninhabited, empty for decades, made of bricks that will eventually crumble and become part of the desert sands. Color would be a cheat. Or, rather, any other color would be a cheat. These are in fact color photographs, but the color is just various shades of gray. The economy of these pictures, their spare formalism, does something unusual with the gray scale of black-and-white photography. It makes it a color rather than having it substitute for colors that are not present or solicit feelings that are not felt.

  But it is rare that gray is not something other than itself.21 Black-and-white photography succeeded in making it the color of colors, though metaphorically it is often the exact opposite: the color of colorlessness. Gray is humdrum, anonymous, bland, nondescript; it is dreary, dull, drab, and disappointing. A state of mind, a mode of being, the color of both inner and outer conformity. It’s the color of the comfortable, though complacent, gray-toned world of the movie Pleasantville (1998), the black-and-white world of a fictional 1950s television show into which the film’s central characters, two siblings, Jennifer and David (played by Reese Witherspoon and Toby McGuire), are magically transported. Pleasantville is a world that is clean and safe, limited and predictable. There are no challenges and almost no surprises. And there is no world outside. Geography lessons at school focus only on the street names of the town, and you learn that “the end of Main Street is just the beginning again.”22

  And there is no color. Or, there is no color until Jennifer seduces Skip, the captain of the basketball team. On his drive home afterward, still obviously dazed by the experience, suddenly Skip sees “against a gray picket fence, on a black and white street in a black and white neighborhood, A SINGLE RED ROSE IS BLOOMING” (Figure 46).

  Slowly more and more color begins to appear in Pleasantville (and in Pleasantville). Initially the color appears only as details are added to interrupt its gray-toned world—red brake lights, a pink bubble, a green car. And eventually it differentiates whole characters, who themselves become “colored” as they embrace emotion, while those who don’t remain gray and anxiously attempt to preserve their gray world. “No Coloreds” signs begin to appear around town, as the film suggests a racial politics that it never develops (most notably by a trial scene with the “coloreds” seated upstairs in the courtroom, an allusion to the trial scene in the 1962 film To Kill a Mockingbird). Eventually color takes over the whole town, as a sign of the world of wonder and p
ossibility, as well as of complexity and challenge, that the black-and-white world of Pleasantville had been denied.

  FIGURE 46: Still from Pleasantville, 1998

  Pleasantville falls into color.23 It is sign of the loss of an unearned and unsatisfying innocence, signaled in the film, as is only right, by a bite of an apple (and fleetingly reinforced in a detail in Bill Jonson’s painting on his soda shop’s window showing a partially eaten apple with a serpent coiled around the piece of fruit). Color comes at a price (at one time literally—in RKO’s 1938 film Carefree, Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire’s song-and-dance number “I Used to Be Color Blind” was supposed to be the single scene shot in color in an otherwise black-and-white movie, but the witty idea was abandoned ­because of the cost involved). In Pleasantville, which was shot in color and then digitally manipulated to produce the effects of black and white, the price is the loss of innocence and simplicity, but a price that is paid without complaint.

  The interplay of black and white and color works differently in the film The Wizard of Oz (1939), where the “real” world of Kansas is rendered in sepia-tinged grays before Dorothy and Toto are swept away into the dreamscape of Technicolor. But no less than in Pleasantville, the gray is a judgment. Not, however, a judgment on conformity but a statement on the unremitting harshness of daily life that has abraded the color from the world, leaving only the gray, windswept plains and the ashen existence of their population. “The sun and wind had taken the sparkle from [Auntie Em’s] eyes and left them a sober gray,” as L. Frank Baum says in the novel on which the film was based: “They had taken the red from her cheeks and lips, and they were gray also.” That’s the way Kansas is described: gray lives lived on “the great gray prairie,” in “a house as dull and gray as everything else,” where even blades of grass, as the novel says, were burnt by the sun until they “were the same gray color to be seen everywhere.” And it was only Toto who saved Dorothy “from growing as gray as her other surroundings,” and Miss Gulch, of course, is trying to take the dog away.24

  It is an oppressive gray sameness, broken only when all that gray is “gathered” and “unleashed,” in Salman Rushdie words, in the tornado that transports Dorothy “somewhere over the rainbow” into a world of fantastic color: a world of ruby slippers and the yellow brick road that leads to the Emerald City.25

  And, nonetheless, always Dorothy wants to go home.

  In the novel, the Scarecrow wonders about this determination. “I cannot understand why you should wish to leave this beautiful country and go back to the dry, gray place you call Kansas,” he says to her. The answer is only that Kansas is home. “No matter how dreary and gray our homes are,” says Dorothy, “we people of flesh and blood would rather live there than in any other country, be it ever so beautiful. There is no place like home.”

  Both the novel and the film work very hard to make us believe that, but maybe even Dorothy doesn’t. Certainly her answer does not convince the Scarecrow: “Of course I cannot understand it,” he said. “If your heads were stuffed with straw, like mine, you would probably all live in the beautiful places, and then Kansas would have no people at all. It is fortunate for Kansas that you have brains.”26

  Or maybe just as fortunate for Kansas that those living there have never been to Oz, or even to California. Maybe it was different in 1899, when the novel was written, than in 1939, when the film came out. Some people have thought that the novel was a disguised political allegory about monetary policy (the yellow brick road as the Gold Standard!).27 Far-fetched, perhaps. But in 1939 maybe it was not so far-fetched to see the film as a not-so-disguised allegory about the Depression: the gray landscape of the Dust Bowl giving way to the bright promise of Oz, or the only somewhat less fantastical California. (Baum himself had moved from a depressed—if not yet Depression—North Dakota to Chicago and then to Hollywood in 1910.) And Kansas migrants did head west in great numbers in the second half of the 1930s after years of drought and dust storms, which had turned their once-green farmland gray. Rushdie suggests that the song “Over the Rainbow” could be “the anthem of all the world’s migrants.”28 But even if they sing of that place “where troubles melt like lemon drops,” most still dream of going home.

  Dorothy doesn’t choose to leave Kansas, but it wasn’t really a choice for the real Kansans who did. Dorothy is unwillingly ripped from her home, however dreary and gray it may be. But the tornado, an all-too-familiar weather phenomenon in Kansas, is just one of the many unpredictable and irresistible forces that uproot people and set them out on perilous roads (very few of which are yellow bricked) to escape the misery that home can become.

  Dorothy is an unwilling migrant—almost all are—who finds herself in a new land of color. But unlike almost all other migrants, she does return home. (In the film, unlike the novel, she has, of course, actually never left. In the film, there’s no place but home.) Dorothea Lange’s migrant mother stayed in California, and Kuntz’s migrant family is still looking for a refuge in an increasingly unwelcoming Europe and the United States. Dorothy, however, does find herself safely back in Kansas as the film turns back to reality—and back to its initial monochrome.

  But the Scarecrow’s earlier bewilderment about why anyone would want to live in Kansas remains. It is hardly dismissed or discredited by the film’s return to the bleak grayness of the Kansas plains. Gray is still the color of dust and disappointment. Although in 1939, gray was also still the usual color by which the world was represented in film and photography, the ­Technicolor world “over the rainbow” holds out a promise that we might have other lives, lived in other places, but places that we might one day come to call “home.”

  Notes

  Color Matters

  An Introduction

  1. The phrase is best known from Thucydides, who is quoting a “Hymn to Apollo.” See his History of the Peloponnesian War, 3.105.

  2. William Gladstone, Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age, vol. 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1858), 488.

  3. Rolf Kuschel and Torben Monberg, “‘We Don’t Talk Much About Colour Here’: A Study of Colour Semantics on Bellona Island,” Man 9, no. 2 (1974): 238.

  4. Edward Sapir, Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, Brace, 1921), 14.

  5. William Wordsworth, “My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold,” in William Wordsworth: The Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 246.

  6. John Keats, “Lamia,” in Complete Poems, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 357.

  7. Benjamin Haydon, The Autobiography and Memoirs of Benjamin Haydon, ed. Tom Taylor, vol. 1 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1926), 269.

  8. Thomas Campbell, “To the Rainbow,” in The Poetical Works of Thomas Campbell, vol. 1 (London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1830), 216.

  9. James Thompson, “Spring,” in The Complete Poetical Works of James Thompson, ed. J. L. Robertson (London: Henry Frowde, 1908), 10.

  10. Vladimir Nabokov, The Gift (New York: Vintage, 1991), 6.

  11. Isaac Newton to Henry Oldenburg, December 21, 1675, Cambridge University Library, MS Add. 9597/2/18/46-47.

  12. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “The Lady’s Yes,” in Selected Poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. Margaret Foster (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 150.

  13. Leonardo da Vinci, Treatise on Painting, trans. John Francis Rigoud (1877; reprint, Mineola, NY: Dover, 2005), 101. Leonardo’s “treatise” was compiled by Francesco Melzi, a student of Leonardo’s, in about 1540.

  14. Josef Albers, The Interaction of Color: Fiftieth Anniversary Edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013).

  15. Isaac Newton, “Of Colours,” Cambridge University Library, MS Add. 3995, 15.

  16. See David Batchelor’s brilliant Chromophobia (London: Reaktion, 2000).

  17. Fairfield Porter, Art in Its Own Terms: Selected Criticism, 1935–1975, ed. Rackstraw Downes (Boston: MFA Publications, 1979)
, 80. Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative), ed. Michael Everton (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2016), 107. The narrator, however, wonders where “the orange tint ends and the violet tint begins,” but that’s clearly not the problem, since yellow, green, blue, and indigo come between them.

  18. Colm Tóibín, “In Lovely Blueness: Adventures in Troubled Light,” in Blue: A Personal Selection from the Chester Beatty Library Collections (Dublin: Chester Beatty Library, 2004), [5].

  CHAPTER ONE

  Roses Are Red

  1. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916; reprint, New York: Viking, 1965), 12.

  2. Democritus, “Fragment (α),” quoted in John Mansley Robinson, An Introduction to Early Greek Philosophy: The Chief Fragments and Ancient Testimony with Connecting Commentary (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1968), 202.

  3. Diogenes Laertes, Lives and Opinions of the Eminent Philosophers, trans. R. D. Hicks, vol. 2 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 449.

  4. Newton uses the phrase first in “A Letter of Mr. Isaac Newton … containing his New Theory about Light and Colors,” which appeared in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 6 (1671–72): 3075.