THAT SHOT SANNE DE WILDE
This photograph is the key image of the series,
The Island of the Colorblind.
A lot of my work on my personal projects
is centred around a certain genetic trail
that runs through people's lives
and that shapes and forms their community
or their personal life or their physical identity.
The Island of the Colorblind is a series about achromatopsia
or complete colour blindness.
There's an island in the Pacific in Micronesia
where there's an extremely high percentage
of this very extraordinary kind of colour blindness
that doesn't allow people to see colour.
I started photography developing in the dark room.
In black and white, on film and making my own prints.
Since then, I never touched black and white
until this project came up.
So after I returned from the island,
I invited achromatopic people from the Netherlands and Belgium
to bring colour back into my black and white images,
to literally paint onto the image.
People felt free and at the same time struggled
with not being able to have control over colour as well,
because I wouldn't tell them which colours they were using.
And it makes people feel unsecure and uncomfortable.
During the painting sessions I organised, I met Annefloor.
She's from the Netherlands
and she has achromatopic vision and she's super talented.
She made beautiful paintings
and really added on another layer to the work
by really allowing me to see through her eyes.
To Pingelap I brought my D700 that I had converted to infrared
and the D810 that I used as a normal camera.
I wanted to experiment with infrared
because I wanted to find a way for myself to redefine
and rediscover colour while shooting the project.
With this converted camera that reads light differently,
I was also triggered to rethink the colour perspective
and the result of that are images that are so surreal in their colours
that it makes people open up to this whole new reality
and this freedom of colour that you get
if you let go of the conventional way of looking at it.
The work The Island of the Colorblind is about trying to open people's eyes
to not seeing the absence of something
as something you lack or as a weakness,
but as strength, as something that is a richness,
as something that adds on to your own reality that you create
and that you have the power to create and that you create in your own way.
And it's about connecting vision at the same time acknowledging
that we all see the world differently.
THAT SHOT
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