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# 17 COLOR #
Myojo 2007.11



Color. Me, I like colors. But I only realized this quite recently, I used to dislike colors. Even saying I disliked them, it wasn't as if I disliked all of them, I liked black and white, in other words monotone colors. I didn't have a conception of something like colorful inside myself. For stage costumes as well as for my private clothes, I liked black, and I also liked monochrome pictures of myself best.

But lately, I've come to like it colorful (of course I still love black even now, and it would be a lie to say that I like every color). The reason why I started to think this way is that I started taking pictures myself, I think.

Since I basically belong to the kind of people who work in front of the camera, I had more opportunities to come into touch with photography. But at that time I didn't think about anything but how to best show myself. Ever since I picked up photographing, I came to understand a little bit about how it is to be behind the camera. It's because you often feel from a subject this beauty that consists of many different colors. There also exists a beauty born from reducing the colors when taking a black and white picture of a colorful thing. All of this is because color exists. If there weren't any colors, it would be boring for the people in front and behind of the camera. If that were the case, I don't think there would be anything like memorial photos.

Thanks to taking up photography, I was able to understand what my favourite colors are. There are a lot, for example 1) strong primary colors. Red! or Blue!, I am fascinated by bright colors like these, they attract me a lot. 2) Faded colors. Like a scene from an old movie. I feel that there they have a soft appeal. 3) Black, after all. It's the coolest color, and I'll always love this black which reminds me of a man not swayed by anything. [Note: In Japanese, he literally says "a man not colored by anything" which comes closer to the properties of the color black (and is meant positively), but I couldn't think of a better way to translate this, sorry!] Like I wrote before, I've always loved 3), but 1) and 2) are colors I only came to appreciate in the last year or so, and the things I like have changed accordingly.

Colors have a lot of influence on many things, this is true for movies, for concerts, for pictures, for music, for everything. You can express your image of someone in colors, and there even is a job like doing color therapy to heal people's hearts through the effects of colors. The power of colors is quite strong, and in a way, they may be such mysterious things that they can't be described in words.

And well. From here on, it gets a bit complicated, but it is said that the colors we see with our eyes are actually the result of things absorbing and reflecting light. The light which we see with our eyes is divided according to its wavelength into red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet. For example, an apple appears red because it reflects the red light which has a long wavelength, while absorbing the other colors. To make it short, the colors we see with our eyes is actually the light which is being disliked and told, "I won't pick you up! Go away!" Somehow I think this is really interesting. The colors of things are made up of disliked light, and if they had a different color, it would make me feel sick. You wouldn't like if people were blue all over, would you. We've come to take the colors for granted which make up the world around us. The light which is disliked by all things is loved by us, it is changed into something necessary which we cannot live without. Being influenced by the disliked light that we see with our eyes, colors are really something tricky.

I like pictures of the sky. The blue that sky and sea dislike makes us feel incredibly calm. The sky in the middle of the night shows us a brilliant moon by disliking black. The light which I dislike, how does it paint me? It would be great if I disliked a beautiful "color".

Translated by riccichan

* Do not repost/retranslate w/o permission *

Labels: Kato Shigeaki, ROCK STAR