COLOR IS MY SUBJECT, AS MUCH AS THE SUBJECT ITSELF.
Chromatic Reflection Sagaponack, New York 2023
HOLI
In 2007, I photographed Holi, the “Festival of Colors” in India, losing a couple of lenses to the ravages of gritty, colored powder that insinuated itself into every gasket, every seal, and every place it could, wreaking havoc with my equipment. But I managed to survive and make some of my best images through sheer determination and perseverance.
It is a time of great joy in India, as it marks the celebration of Lord Krishna’s birth, and with the arrival of spring the streets are filled with masses of people throwing color on everyone and everything.
When I arrived at Mathura in the early afternoon and scouted a rooftop perch, I was the only person there, but as the hours passed, more and more people crowded in nearby, and a few climbed onto the overhang with me. I considered abandoning my spot, but it was certain to be the best possible place from which to photograph. And as the empty spots dwindled around me, I got high on the sheer terror and adrenaline pumping through me. At a certain point, most photographers weigh disaster against “getting the picture,” and that was all I could think about—getting the picture.
Someone threw the first fistful of powdered color into the air and others followed, hurling buckets of colored oil and water from the surrounding rooftops. Volley after volley of every color in the spectrum rained down on the figures below, who were quickly
disappearing in a misty rainbow of fog. Just when I thought my lungs would explode from the dust-filled air, the tempo skyrocketed, and I could only photograph blindly as the color permeated every crevice of my plastic-wrapped lens and camera. I looked at the frenzied crowd around me, who had morphed into color-drenched supplicants.
As the chanting, noise, and color shocked my body into submission, I wondered if I was going to wake up from a dream that bordered on a nightmare. Finally, after several tons of color had been hurled, the unimaginable happened—everyone ran out of ammo. I scrambled off the rooftop and looked down at my arms and hands and legs and realized I would have to throw away everything I was wearing. One of the men standing next to me began to laugh, and when I realized he was laughing at me, I burst out in laughter, too. Everyone was laughing! We had survived. Later that evening, as I lay back on my hotel bed, dazed with exhaustion, I grinned—it had been a long, crazy day, but I was elated because India held me in its spell.
Shirt Mathura, India 2007
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Holi Face I Jaipur, India 2007
Holi Face II Jaipur, India 2007
Holi
COWBOY
The color smeared while I watched the car’s wipers sweep back and forth, creating a prismatic wash of reds, blues, greens, and yellows.
I first saw “Wendover Will”—a.k.a. the “Neon Cowboy”—through the windshield of my car on a rainy night. Who could miss its sixstory-tall, dazzling 1,184 feet of neon tubing? I made a few double exposures and kept heading west to Reno, pulling over before I fell asleep at the wheel.
If you lived in New York in the mid-1980s, you may have met Rudi Stern, the wizard of neon, who owned a gallery in Soho called Let There Be Neon. His first daughter was named Lumiere, the French word for light. In his obituary in 2006, The New York Times wrote, “Rudi Stern, a multimedia artist who spent decades bending light
to his will in the service of both art and commerce—from the psychedelic shows he created for Timothy Leary to the vibrant neon in Studio 54—died in Cadiz, Spain.”
Rudi had a stunning collection of neon clocks that filled an entire floor at his loft. I will never forget when he flipped a light switch and suddenly the room was ablaze with candy-colored neon from the ’20s, ’30s, ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s—all rare pieces of American roadside kitsch. Rudi’s childlike spirit and his love of neon are with me when I try to bend the spectrum to my desire, but never to my will. Only Rudi could do that.
Neon Cowboy West Wendover, Nevada 1983
COLOR
In 1967, as some of my classmates at Syracuse University were drafted into the Vietnam War, Professor Fred Demarest at the Newhouse School of Journalism asked a young photographer from New York City to show his photographs and talk to the students. Fred was a closet visionary, for he chose the photographer whose work was, at that time, pushing the boundaries of color photography in a way that had nothing to do with journalism.
I had long hair, very long hair, and I was falling in love with the mistress of color photography. When the first 35mm Kodachrome slide dropped into the projector’s beam of light, I felt an electric current run up my spine. It would be another three years before Ernst Haas’s book, The Creation, became a best-seller; but as slide after slide projected on the screen, the room was hushed. Ernst had just returned from Yellowstone, where he did an essay for Look magazine, and as he talked I heard the voice of a mystic, the voice of someone transfixed by color and who was redefining it, as well as
photography. When I went to New York later that year and visited him on Seventh Avenue, he asked me if I painted, and I said I didn’t know how to paint. He responded that I didn’t have to know how to paint to paint.
I was a slow learner, but he told me to open my eyes, see differently, dream, let my mind wander wherever it would take me, and remain at heart an amateur, for amateurs are the ones with eyes wide open. We are taught to think linearly, that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. Nothing could be further from the truth. We find beauty in chaos, and chaos in beauty—they are both there, if only we would look. The calligraphy of light and color is the language of all art; we are just temporary custodians of that dialect.
Wall of Color Sagaponack, New York 2024
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Except where noted, all photographs and text © Eric Meola 2024
“An Eruption of Color: Color Photography from World War II to the Dawn of Digital” © Carol McCusker 2024
This essay is adapted from the second of a three-part series of articles on the history of color photography originally published in Color magazine in 2009.
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Design by Gregory Wakabayashi
case: Electric Graffiti Sag Harbor, New York 2011
For additional information about the photographer please visit www.ericmeola.com
Title: Bending Light: The Moods of Color // Eric Meola
ISBN: 9781864709957
This title was commissioned in IMAGES’ Melbourne office and produced as follows: editorial Georgia (Gina) Tsarouhas, Jeanette Wall / proofing Helen Koehne / production Nicole Boehringer
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