I have always been fascinated with how color as seen and photographed breaks down into the three additive primaries of red, green and blue. As color imaging frequently takes its cue from the eye's red, green and blue light sensitive structures, the separate manipulation of each of these sets of visual information often yields photographs that are mysterious and brilliantly colorful..
I had the opportunity to put this into practical use when John Winzeler of Winzeler Gear needed a set of graphic images to hang on the wall of a common are of his Chicago plant. The oddly shaped space needed one vertical and three long horizontal pieces, so I opted to create four pieces of identical aspect ratio with one designed to be rotated vertically.
The colors for each of these pieces would be generated by using three identical photos of a gear, shot in black and white, with only the lighting position changed in each. That way, the difference in how the shadows were rendered would create and modulate the colors.
It worked, although not at first of course. Many iterations of exposure and light placement were needed to eventually create the multihued, overlapping planes of color I had in mind. Once the individual films had been scanned and their information nudged into perfect register, each of the four pieces were fine tuned until they carried the feeling and power I was going for. Lab One of Chicago then made large 18" by 56" Lambda prints direct from digital files and mounted them flush to Masonite boards for hanging.