To accompany the release of his book Lumière, published by Éditions Allary, Matthieu Ricard is offering a series of blogs on photography. An invitation to share wonder, celebrate the beauty of the world, and continue the quest for light that has guided him throughout his sixty-year journey.
Buddhist texts tell the story of a blind man to whom people tried to explain what white is. “White is the color of snow,” they first told him. “Ah, so white is cold,” the blind man concluded. They tried again: “White is the color of swans.” “Good, then white goes ‘swish-swish,’” the blind man replied, mimicking the rustle of a swan’s wings taking flight. Is color nothing more than a mental construction? Goethe seems to agree: “A color that is not looked at is a color that does not exist.”
As Michel Pastoureau, the great historian of colors, points out, “Defining what color is is not an easy exercise; one only has to open a dictionary to realize it: authors always have great difficulty proposing a clear, relevant, intelligible definition that fits within a reasonable number of lines.” Le Grand Robert, for instance, defines color as the “character of a light, of the surface of an object (independently of its form), according to the particular visual impression they produce.” It also speaks of a “property attributed to light and to objects of producing such an impression (color).” So we are hardly any further along. This inability to define color was noted by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in Remarks on Colour: “If we are asked: ‘what do the words red, yellow, blue, green mean?’ we can, of course, immediately point to things that have these colors. But our ability to explain the meaning of these words goes no further.”
“More than nature, pigment, light, the eye or the brain, it is society that ‘makes’ color,” Pastoureau continues, explaining how color was first defined as a substance, a film that covers and conceals things, and then—after Newton succeeded in 1666 in dispersing white light into different colored rays with a prism—color came to be defined as light rather than merely as matter.
As the historian has shown, the perception of colors and the value we accord them has changed profoundly over the course of history and varies greatly from one color to another. In prehistoric times, red was the dominant color. According to Pastoureau, “For the human sciences, speaking of the ‘color red’ is almost a pleonasm. Red is the archetypal color. The first that humans mastered, manufactured, reproduced, and developed into different shades, first in painting, then in dyeing. […] This also explains why in many languages the same word can mean ‘red,’ ‘beautiful,’ and ‘colored’ all at once.” Even if, in our daily lives, red has become discreet—at least compared to the place it held in Greco-Roman antiquity or in the Middle Ages—red remains the strongest, most striking color, the richest in poetic, dreamlike, and symbolic horizons.
As for blue, “For the peoples of antiquity,” the historian still tells us, “this color mattered little; for the Romans it was unpleasant and devaluing: the color of barbarians. Yet today, blue is Europeans’ favorite color, far ahead of green and red.”
Personally, I have always been fascinated by the play of colors—their interactions, their mixtures, their contrasts. A film by Sergei Parajanov, a genius director of Armenian-Russian origin, titled The Fire Horses, one of the rare films I have watched several times, deeply inspired my photographic work. The film depicts, among other things, an extended sequence during a village festival in the Carpathians, in which the filmmaker endlessly spins on himself, creating a dazzling whirlwind of blurred colors from which distinct faces sporadically emerge. A sentence by Pierre Bonnard perfectly describes what I feel when photographing color: “I realized that color could express everything without resorting to relief or texture. I understood that it was possible to translate light, forms, and figures through color alone, without having to rely on other values.”
You can find this entire photographic project in Lumière, published by Éditions Allary.
Matthieu Ricard donates all of his income—royalties from his books, photographs, and lectures—to development projects run by the Karuna-Shechen association, which works to reduce poverty and empower the most vulnerable women, men, and children. In this way, every reader becomes a direct contributor to solidarity through their purchase.