Psychochromatic: Unravveling the Emotional Language of Color

Photobooks are one of the best means of disseminating a photo project and it’s become increasingly popular and accessible. In an Advanced Photography course I took, our class was tasked with creating photobooks of our own. The assignment was to create a self-defined photo project that had to be conceptually and formally cohesive and developed into a meaningful sequential book form.

This Photobook was originally inspired by the image displayed on the cover. It is a combined scanogram-photogram I created, titled Memento Mori. This image was create in an Experimental Photography class I took. In developing this piece, the class was assigned to explore two different ways to create a photograph without a typical camera, one being scanograms and the other being photograms. The second part of the assignment was to use blending options within Adobe Photoshop in order to create a well composed, layered image.

While examining the relationship between the two subjects, and the inclusion of a singular color, there was a clear connection between the impact the role of a color has on the broad spectrum of human emotions we experience. The emotional language of color is revealed through the power of pigments. Color translates ordinary and or sometimes indescribable psychological states into complex expressions of emotion.