Humors (2010-2011)

Concept

The title of this series (“Humors”) was chosen in part to acknowledge the vaguely satirical nature of some of the images, but more importantly to draw a connection to my recent interest in humorism, particularly as referenced in European painting and drawing. Humorism is an ancient theory that supposes human biology, illness, and even various personality traits can be attributed to a balance/imbalance of four elemental substances ("humors") found in the body: [blue] phlegm, [red] blood, yellow bile, and black bile.

For example, in a self-portrait drawn by Albrecht Dürer, the artist depicts himself pointing at his spleen. This image has sometimes been interpreted as an indication of Dürer's state of mind, because the spleen was thought to be the source of black bile, an abundance of which caused melancholia.

Process

To produce this body of work, I enlisted an 8x10 view camera fitted with a homemade scanning back. As a side effect of necessary scanner modifications, the camera has no native sensitivity to color. Instead, each subject is captured through different color filters in a series of separate exposures, which are later combined to produce a full color image.

In order to achieve balanced color, the filters must strictly follow either the additive (red, green, blue) or subtractive (cyan, magenta, yellow) primary color model; any imbalance in the relative strength of one or more filters causes a color cast over the final image; any movement of the subject or camera between exposures causes the appearance of offset color in the final image.

Outcome

While my experiments in color imbalance are not intended as a prescriptive analogy for the supposed psychological or biological imbalances of humorist theory, I believe there is strength in this metaphor beyond the simple correlation between color theory models and the ancient elemental models of nature.  In the same way that humorism can present an intuitive analogy for the way people may feel “out of balance” physically or emotionally, so too can color provoke an amorphous but powerful mood from an image.  By deliberately introducing false or inaccurate color in a semi-controlled process, I hope to reveal a truth beyond that which is literally seen or factually understood.