UNSTILL LIFE
“The absurd is born of the confrontation between the human call and the unreasonable silence of the world.”
- Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
It has become a common belief that reality is made up exclusively of what can be felt, seen or heard. Our imagination has grown poorer, increasingly inflexible and more reliant on the realm of the visible.
We have learned to almost exclusively accept that which is tactile, failing to acknowledge all of which is beyond our reach; that infinite number of essence-enriching possibilities that can exist simultaneously in any given space.
In striving to build a common knowledge, we have undermined the importance of relativity, thereby losing the mental elasticity to truthfully recognize different and contrasting scenarios.
Following this misconception we have unwittingly chosen to think of colors as factual reality.
We have transformed colors into yet another scale built to categorize and catalogue our surroundings; a common standpoint that brings order and “rationality” to a societal structure that increasingly seeks objectivity.
For the sake of efficiency we have assumed that our surroundings are actually as they appear, but what if this perception was all an illusion? What if the colors we perceive are nothing more than an invention of our brains?
This collection of photographs was shot using a combination of analog film rolls and digital sensors that react to infrared (IR) light. Infrared light is an electric radiation invisible by the human eye. More than fifty percent of the total energy produced by the sun arrives on Earth in the form IR light. The colors we see are simply an interpretation that our retina is giving to light reflecting from a determinate object. The world as seen by the human eye is an invention of our brains, which translate the information from the light receptors within the eye into the familiar sensation of color. As humans we are incapable of seeing the full spectrum of light and consequently this limitation ends up shaping our perception of the world. Dogs visually experience the world in black and white, bees do so in ultra violet and even humans perceive colors in varying ways and to diverse extents. Are we all living separate realities or is our idea of reality worth reconsidering?