about a cover image

Today I wanted to tell you about the image that Felix and I chose for the front cover of Colour at Work – our exciting brand new book about colour, which is now available to pre-order, with free worldwide shipping (for a very limited time).

Some of you may not have realised that our colourful cover is a photograph, which was taken by Tom, at a specific time and in a very specific place. It is a beautiful image, and it is a picture of something. But what is that something? Here’s Tom to explain.

“This photo was taken near Ruisgarry in Berneray. We had arrived on the island earlier that day and were looking forward to a relaxing break after a frantic few weeks earlier shipping out our West Highland Way books and preparing Ootlier 2 for printing. We had wonderful weather on the trip over and as the evening approached I headed out with my camera to explore my surroundings. I found an elevated spot with views over Berneray’s west beach, and beyond to the Atlantic.”

It was a beautiful spring evening and the sun had set just after 8pm.

I’d taken some “normal” photos  over the sea and the colours were really beautiful – fiery oranges and yellows in the wispy clouds.

The light had begun to fade, so I decided to head back home. But as the sun disappeared over the horizon and the light faded the colours took on more complex unusual and muted tones – not those you might typically associate with a sunset. So I stopped, and tried to make a series of images to capture this colourful palette. 

As there wasn’t much light at this point, I had to use a longer exposure to capture enough light to make the image – leaving the camera shutter open for 3 seconds. Around that time, I was enjoying experimenting with using camera movement during long exposures to achieve an abstract, painterly effect – smearing and mixing the light, like paint, across the camera sensor.

Using a long lens (600mm) I zoomed in on the area I wanted to capture and composed the shot so that there were four distinct zones in the frame; the dark surrounding farmland in the foreground, the shimmering green-blue sea and pinky-purple low clouds in the middle and the last scattering of orange sunlight in the high wispy clouds. I hit the shutter release and slowly rotated the camera left, then right, gathering all the available light for those 3 seconds. By combining a long exposure with camera movement, the image became painterly and abstract.

The subject of this photograph, then, is the quality, colour and intensity of the light,  rather than the specific details of the scene. And I feel that this abstraction, this focus on colour and light presents a different kind of picture of that April night – one which speaks to the experience rather than the “view.” When I see this image, I can feel the cool Hebridean night air, hear the distant sea and remember my feelings of peace as the sky darkened and I turned to head home.”

So why did we choose Tom’s photograph? Well, we felt that its distinctive combination of material reality and abstract representation really gets to the heart of Colour at Work, capturing, in a single colourful image the essence of what makes our book rather different to other titles in its field. If you’ve got any books about colour on your bookshelf, you might notice that they tend to be rather discipline specific, exploring philosophical and intellectual concepts on the one hand or specific material practices on the other. Our book doesn’t draw such disciplinary boundaries, taking a much more expansive, in the round approach, bringing together thinking and making, creative representations and cultural contexts, critical ideas and practical activities. Just like Tom’s photograph, in other words, Colour at Work unites the abstract and the material, the palpable and the conceptual, exploring, in twenty beautifully illustrated essays how colour defines the world, and how we, in our turn, can make the world more colourful through the creative work of our own hands.

Thanks for this beautiful, suggestive photograph, Tom!

Colour at Work is now availble to pre-order (with free worldwide shipping)