Roxann Arwen Mills – Self-portrait with blue neon in bathroom from Influences of Blue series (1998-2004)

EDIT: Apologies. I completely fucked this one up. The above images have
been viciously de-saturated by some internet asshat. You can see the
full color originals here. (Thanks as always to @sporeprint​ for the eagle eyed correction.)

One of the things I was told very early on post-buying a 35mm SLR and focusing on shooting B&W stock was that to do B&W right/well I needed to invest in a bunch of color filters.

A yellow filter will famously make blue skies really pop. (If you understand the inter-relationship between the RGB (additive) and CMYK (subtractive) color models, then what filters do what can be easily decoded. If you’re like me and understand the theory inside and out but have a bit more trouble when it comes to practical application: here’s an indisipensible intro.

I knew all this but still one of the only things that’s every truly surprised me as far as how I thought something would would appear photographed and how it actually appeared on the film was a snapshot I took in The Met of Ellsworth Kelly’s Spectrum V. (Rendered in B&W, the panels are indistinguishable from one another.)

My suspicion is that this is one of the things Mills is up to with these images–interrogating the subtle ways that the color subtly shifts the way that a B&W emulsions registers light.