Dylanne Lee – foundation (2015)

This is essentially monochromatic as everything from the skin tone to the dark red of the wall in shadow at frame right is hanging out in red’s third of the color wheel.

It’s interesting because I’m not entirely sold on the composition. Yes, it functions and has a mostly consistent logic to it. And as much as I’m of a mindset that unless your camera shoots in native B&W whether analog or digital, that no one has any business ever using desaturate to create B&W images, this would actually work as a grayscale image (with only some minimal contrast tweaks).

That begs the question of whether or not color is essential to the image? On an objective level, I would argue it isn’t. However, within the context of Dylanne Lee’s work–who FTR isn’t one person it’s a image making duo from Mexico City–the only thing that consistently defines the work is it’s interest in instilling stolid scenes with a sort of inertia as potential for momentum instead of absence of it.

By that expression, the color makes sense. (And I think someone more fluent with color theory than I am could probably to the imagistic equivalent of diagramming a sentence to demonstrate how the color activates a dynamism that would read as more contemplative in B&W.)

I suspect this may be film. If so, it would benefit enormously from a dye-transfer print, IMO.