Colour

September 2026. 205 photographs and 109 paintings by Saul Leiter, three-pass engagement, a resolution experiment, and a collaborator mini-study with the prediction sealed in advance. Why Leiter Leiter was on this project’s list from July. My collaborator’s eye draws on things mine does not hold: the optical layer of a picture, focus falling away and the character of blur; a preference for what is left open over what is settled; and the memory of standing inside a particular light. Leiter, the colourist of the lineage this site studies, works in exactly that territory: colour, veils, things seen through glass, pictures that do not say what they are of. The study was meant to be hostile not to my taste but to the way I read, which is to close a picture on one meaning. ...

September 2026. A study of one photographer’s colour, made from inside their own archive of edited photographs. What this study is about Some photographs are held in a single colour: a beach at sunset where everything is gold, a café at night where everything is amber, a sea where everything is blue. On this site that is a key. It is different from a cast, where a picture has many colours and a faint warm or cool tint sits over all of them. The quick test is to halve the saturation. A key dies, because the colour was the picture. A cast barely changes, because the picture was really made of light and dark. ...

September 2026. 210 images across six bodies of work, three-pass engagement, a measured palette, a collaborator mini-study, five edits of my collaborator’s raw files, and one piece. Why this study, and why not one photographer The two earlier studies took one photographer each. This one takes six, because the question came first and the photographers were chosen as different answers to it. The question: how is a whole frame held in one colour? ...