PURPLE
CHROMATISM
Early December, Lomography emailed me with a few of my favorite words: monochrome, purple, film.
I was to test one of the two films they had received from Vienna. I chose to hike, and included the light of the island unto my violet emulsion. Near Istanbul, the escape and I refused to make purple human.
The film didn’t exactly follow my conception of purple, and my usual color palette. And that’s the beauty of film photography with Lomography, you have next to no control. You have to accept it, let it free, let yourself freer and enjoy the surprise.
The colored film and its purple didn’t give what I expected from it, and it made things better, different.
- Let’s us think PURPLE:
Suffragettes, Spiritual Leaders (witches and priests scarves alike — adding to the mystery of this tint, we don’t know if it’s good or evil), Emperors, Aristocracy — Hierarchy and Fantasy. Richness.
Human, hierarchy, order — artificial order, people of stature. I can see the fluff and the rarity it conveyed. The sense of originality — quirkiness (I’ve had a strange German teacher dressed in purple from head to toe, every single day, for years).
Purple has been humanized, depending on the context and the timeline, it remained a quirky composition of the light spectrum. The color has an innate artificial aspect — which makes its very encounter in nature so surreal. In nature, we see purple in rare places: lavender, aubergines, grapes, amethysts.
In flowering season of Lavender in Provence, the fields extend to the horizon. Shades of purple blanketing the grounds, and dispersing fragrant smells to the viewer. Magical.
Everyone has a different conception of what is purple. My purple is not your purple. But we have the same red, and the same conception of primary blue.
The chromaticity of this color depends on one’s subjectivity and retina memory, associations (and there’s so much beauty at play in this freedom).
The relation between the color and the human-eye is limited there. Depending on our subjectivity, red and blue converge in different ratios. Some see it with more pink, some with more brown. It is one limit to Homo sapiens supremacy and its optical perceptions.
Purple does not belong to the light spectrum. Physicists have named it a non-spectral color. Purple is artificial, not a part of the rainbow colors.
(PANTONE — Let’s play a game: if everyone emails me back the reference of your ultimate Purple, we can talk about it next week.)
The very vibrant version of purple in my mind is not pastel (not recovered by a flimsy veil of transparent white), there is nothing munching on its reflections and clarity. It’s a total 2603.
- Now some research:
Having purple under our (artistic) control appears to have been difficult. Earliest records show 15th century BC’s Phoenicians extraction from a spiny sea snail. Present-day Lebanon started purple dye-ing.
Phoenicia means the ‘land of purple’. The myth goes back to Hercules’ shepherd dog biting a mollusk Murex on the beach making its mouth a purple shade.
I can totally visualize the many sculptures of Hercules made color and alive, running on the beach to check on his dog’s and the foamy purple around his mouth.
There’s also THIS to consider, scientists say that early life on Earth made everything purple.
And so, colors have labels, like everything in our world.
Purple is neither good or evil. (It has spectral / ghost associations, unearthly unnatural beings — or I just have too many Pokemon connotations).
Purple is the spirituality attained — higher states of consciousness.
I want to link it to egoism. Not to mistake with selfishness.
What is an enlightened being spiritually speaking? Someone who has mastered through and through the art of SELF-LOVE. (wow there).
Taking care of oneself, filling in your needs first — and not expecting others to do the task for you, is an extreme basic lesson we have to get to. After daily reassessing our needs, being egoists, in order to be better humans (meddle in solitary time, thinking, activities that make you feel ok), then we can start giving and receiving, opening ourselves to the world and spread light.
Spirituality takes us through the first steps. We have to learn self-love. And that’s why I started this collection of words up there by Purple is one of my ‘aspirations’. I’m an orange verging on purple.
I am following a path of spirituality, without choosing one God or the other; but solely believing in the Universe and our reason to be here.
While this colour is a story of human control, eye perception and rare accessibility, the Lomography film was teaching me to let it all go and believe in irrationality. Physics would take care of applying light wherever it touched nature, and flows of purple would splash wherever it pleases.
This series of photo is an exercise in presence. I do this every two weekends — a retreat with(in) myself of hiking to the top of this island. There, I talk between trees, I open my hands to the sun, and I cross no other human on my path. It’s a vital grounding moment in the chaotic city I call home: Istanbul.
Originally published as part of Copious Copy — A series of letters between the Earth and you: a weekly cosmos of words about metaphysics and enlightenment, through science and spirituality, consider joining the conversation.
