Lomographic Color Studies: Gray

Let it be known now that the color gray is a color we won't ever get to understand. To study gray and deconstruct its properties and how it stands in humanity is to study the impossible. For as we all know, gray is the color of ambiguity.

In the words of color historian Eva Heller, "gray is too weak to be considered masculine, but too menacing to be considered a feminine color. It is neither warm nor cold, neither material or spiritual. With gray, nothing seems to be decided."

This study itself is ironic.

Little is known of gray -- just that it's the color of dark, gloomy days foreshadowing thunderstorms, or the hair pigment found in aging men and women. It's the color of lead and graphite, easily marked and erased for the fickle-minded.

No wonder a cloud of smoke is often associated to shrouding truths and mysteries. As enigmatic as the lone wolf.

But if there's anything we can all agree on, gray is a color of class and strength. Like the core of each strand of hair, the steel towers that make up the New York skyline, the pipes and rows of metal that make the bones of every mechanism, and the toughened wool of the 60's gray suit. The ladies would wear grisette silhouettes and silver jewelry, even the lower class would don the color inside their factories and workshops. The perfect metaphor for unity, is it not?

Gray is the symbolical color of industrialization and war, even Pablo Picasso celebrates the color in his painting "Guernica". There's no clarity, just moral ambiguity. You just have to live with it.

2017-09-08 #culture #gray #lomographic-color-studies #color-studies