Existential Colour Photography as Social Reality

In an age saturated by images, the existential colour photograph can offer a counterweight: slowing perception, hearing what images whisper rather than shout; reminding us of the beauty of being, but also of its fragility; prompting reflection, ethical engagement.

'To witness a bird in flight is to momentarily inhabit a reality beyond the human - where freedom is not spoken, but felt. In that suspended motion, we glimpse a world untouched by narrative yet shaped by our presence. The image resists urban noise, reminding us that social reality includes silence, ecology, and the fragile lives we rarely notice.'

Abstract

"This essay explores how colour photography, informed by existential philosophy, functions not merely as aesthetic practice but as social reality. We argue that existential colour photography mediates individuals’ experience of being, temporality, mortality, and place, while participating in collective identity, memory, ethics, and environmental awareness. Through philosophical frameworks (existentialism, phenomenology), theories of colour and perception, and photographic criticism, we examine how colour photographs are socially embedded, how they shape and reflect social life, and what tensions they face (representation, commodification, sentimentality). The conclusion suggests pathways by which existential colour photography might contribute to richer social realities in an age of image saturation and ecological crisis.

Introduction

Photography is among the most pervasive visual media of modern social existence. It records, disseminates, and memorializes; it shapes both private identity and public worldviews. While much scholarly attention has focused on documentary photography, photojournalism, or formal aesthetic concerns, there is a growing interest in what might be called existential colour photography—photographic work that uses colour not merely as decorative or descriptive element but as expressive medium for existential themes: presence, temporality, finitude, authenticity, and human and nonhuman being. When we consider such photography as social reality, we explore how images participate in and constitute the shared life of societies—how they shape what is seen, what is valued, how we remember, how we respond ethically.

This essay is structured as follows. First, we clarify key theoretical concepts: existentialism, phenomenology, colour theory, and “social reality.” Second, we analyse how colour photography intersects with existential themes in individual experience. Third, we examine how existential colour photography enters social life: identity, memory, ethics, ecological awareness, cultural critique. Fourth, we survey challenges and tensions. Finally, we consider implications for future photographic practice and social change.

Theoretical Framework

• Existentialism, Phenomenology, and Photography

Existentialism broadly refers to philosophical positions concerned with human existence, freedom, choice, authenticity, mortality, and meaning in a world that lacks inherent purpose (Sartre, 1943/1993; Heidegger, 1927/2010). Phenomenology, especially via Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau‑Ponty, emphasizes lived experience, embodiment, perception, temporality, spatiality. Photographs can serve as existential-phenomenological artefacts: they fix moments of “being‑in‑time,” of presence, offering confrontation with the facticity of existence (mortality, passing time, decay) (Barthes, 1981; Merleau‑Ponty, 1945/2012).

Photography always carries a temporal duality: what is photographed was already past, yet the image persists, bridging past and present. Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida argues that every photograph “testifies” to what has been (the “that‑has‑been”) and is suffused with affect because of mortality. Sontag (1977) similarly reflects on photography’s capacity to freeze and distort time; Benjamin discusses photography’s role in modernity, its reproducibility, its role in changing how we perceive space and time (Benjamin, 1936/2008). To bring in colour complicates and enriches this: colour registers more directly the sensory, material, temporal, and environmental dimensions of being (how daylight shifts, how seasons change, how living beings age or fade).

• Colour Theory, Perception, and Realism

Colour is not a neutral medium. Philosophers of colour debate whether colour is mind‑independent (colour realism), relational (depending on perceiver and conditions), or subjective/phenomenal (dependent on perceptual apparatus) (Hilbert, 1987; Hilbert, 2016; “Colour theories,” Routledge Encyclopaedia). Theories of colour realism (e.g. Keith Allen, various “naïve realist” positions) argue that objects really do have colours as mind‑independent properties, that colour ascriptions are often truth‐apt, and that perceptual variation does not collapse the property (Allen, 2016). Other positions, such as eliminativism, deny that colours exist outside perception.

Meanwhile, perceptual and psychological studies demonstrate that colour naming, colour categorization, and emotional responses to hue, saturation, and light are conditioned by both biology and culture. For example, Zaslavsky, Kemp, Tishby, and Regier (2018) show that color naming across languages reflects both perceptual structure and communicative need. Also, studies (e.g. Oliveira, 2024) show that colour choices (tone, hue, saturation) strongly influence mood, affect, attention in photographs.

• Social Reality and Aesthetic Practice

“Social reality” refers to the structures, constraints, shared meanings, practices, identities, and norms that constitute a society. From social theory, photography is not just a passive mirror of reality but a constitutive medium. Images participate in the construction of what is seen, remembered, valued. Fisher’s (2007) thesis Existential Spatiality and Photography as Social Form is central: it argues that photography (even more than traditional art forms) has become a social form—integral to how we perceive, orient ourselves in, and make sense of space, time, identity, otherness. “Existential spatiality” refers to how space is experienced existentially: not just as geometric or physical space but lived space (place, environment, ecologies) tied to identity, temporality, presence.

Additionally, social theory around modernity (Ray, 2020) discusses how photography shapes the aesthetics of culture—how people’s visual expectations, public sights, the everyday, are mediated through photographic norms.

Thus, existential colour photography lies at the intersection of these threads: philosophy of existence + phenomenology, colour theory, and social construction of reality via visual regimes.

Existential Colour Photography in Individual Experience

How does existential colour photography shape or reflect an individual’s perception of self, temporality, place, and mortality?

• Presence, Embodiment, Place

Colour photography captures features of light, hue, texture, saturation, shadow, that more strongly evoke materiality and the embodied world. For instance, the yellow or golden light of dawn, the shifting greens of foliage, the tears of dusk—all produce more immediate sensory resonance in colour than many monochrome images. Merleau‑Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception argues that perception is not a detached observing, but always embedded: we sense the world through our bodies, with senses, in place (Merleau‑Ponty, 1945/2012). Colour strengthens this embedding: hue is tied to atmospheric conditions, ecology, physical surroundings.

• Temporality and Mortality

Colour contains visible cues of passing time: the decay of colour, autumn leaves, fading light, discoloration, change across seasons; but also human aging, environmental change. Photographs in colour can catch subtle shifts: a rusting metal surface, a fading flower, dusk’s purple‑blues. Because colour itself fades in prints or in memory, its fragility mirrors existential finitude. Barthes (1981) speaks of punctum and the emotional impact of certain photographs as a kind of wound; colour can amplify that by bringing sensory detail that reminds the viewer that “this has passed”.

• Authenticity, Freedom, Anxiety

Existentialism emphasises the human condition marked by freedom, anxiety, choice (Sartre, 1943/1993). Colour photography, when used deliberately (controlled palette, restraint, attention to light), can be authentic in resisting superficial aesthetics, spectacle, stereotypical colour palettes. It can evoke anxiety or disquiet with colour: harsh contrasts, muted tones, unnatural or ambiguous light. Colour becomes part of the photographer’s choice; the difference between photographic truth (or ethical truth) and mere prettification.

Existential Colour Photography as Social Reality

Having considered the individual experiential side, we now turn to how existential colour photography functions socially: shaping collective identity, memory, ethics, politics, ecology; how it participates in and constructs social reality.

• Collective Memory, Place, and Identity

Photography is a powerful agent of memory: what is remembered, how, by whom. Colour photographs help anchor memories in sensory, material detail: the colours of a childhood room, the hues of local flora or architecture, the shifting sky. Such images become part of cultural heritage. The particularities of regional light, landscape, architecture show up in colour; thus photography contributes to place‑making: distinguishing one place from another, building local identity.

In postcolonial, regional, Indigenous contexts, colour photography can be especially important in reclaiming local colour palettes suppressed or homogenized by colonial aesthetic regimes. It shows local ecologies, local buildings, local flora, local ceremonies in their material chromatic particularity, resisting images filtered through dominant globalized visual culture.

• Public Aesthetics, Norms of Seeing

Social norms determine what kinds of images are valued, reproduced, circulated. Advertising, social media, magazines often privilege vibrant, saturated colours, spectacle, exotic tropes. Existential colour photography, by contrast, often uses more restrained or subtle palettes, slower pace, quiet scenes. The tensions between mainstream image culture and existential colour work contribute to how people come to expect or recognise depth, difference, meaning. Photographs that resist visible clichés can shift aesthetic norms: what gets considered “beautiful,” “meaningful,” “real.”

Photographic exhibitions, online sharing, artist‑books all mediate this. Fisher (2007) argues that photography is a social form: people don’t just passively view but build together expectations, orientations, scripts of visual life. Colour photography contributes strongly to this because colour is often socially coded (sunset = romantic, golden hour = magical, certain colours tied to cultural rituals, etc.).

• Ethics, Witnessing, Ecological Awareness

Colour photography can function as witnessing—not only of human struggles but of ecological fragility, environmental change, species decline. In an era of climate crisis, images of wilting plants, dying landscapes, changing seasons, polluted skies, fading coral reefs—all in colour—can render visible what might be otherwise neglected.

There is also the question of responsibility: photographs do more than represent, they can move people. Existential colour photography that brings out fragility, mortality, transience can help awaken ethical awareness. Photographers like Vernon Chalmers, for example (see his writings), use colour, ecology, bird life, and natural cycles to evoke existential moods and provoke reflection on nonhuman beings and environmental responsibility. (Chalmers, 2025)

• Social Critique, Resistance, Representation

Existential colour photography can challenge dominant narratives: of modernity, of development, of progress, of human‑exceptionalism. By focusing on marginal, overlooked, fragile, decaying, or liminal spaces; by showing the nonhuman; by rejecting spectacle; by showing what is more often unseen, color images can open critical perspectives on social issues: inequality, environmental injustice, colonial remains, migrant life, alienation.

Also representation: whose gaze? Which bodies or nonhuman beings are photographed, in which colours, under what conditions? Colour photography both exposes power (through what is shown, what is excluded, how colours are used) and can complicate it (by subverting expectations, foregrounding vulnerability, etc.).

• The Role of Technology, Dissemination and Public Perception

The means of photograph production, reproduction, and dissemination are social. Colour film, digital sensors, post‑processing, filters, compression for online display — all affect what colours look like; what gets preserved; how images circulate. Social media, Instagram etc., favor bright, saturated, fast‑impact images. Existential colour photography must contend with these technological and social pressures.

Public perception is influenced by what images are visible, who has access to produce them, what norms of aesthetic value dominate. Also, images participate in shared symbolic economies: the colours used in environmental campaigns, protests, memorial images, etc., matter. Colour becomes part of symbolic action: red for danger or remembrance, green for environment, blue for calm or melancholy, etc.

Case Studies & Illustrations

Here are a few case studies or illustrative examples (some theoretical, some practical) showing how existential colour photography operates as social reality.

• Fisher’s Existential Spatiality and Photography as Social Form

Andrew Thomas Fisher (2007) in his doctoral thesis Existential Spatiality and Photography as Social Form analyses how photographic culture contributes to social meaning: how people interpret space, place, environment under photographic regimes. Although Fisher’s examples are often monochrome or mixed, his concept of existential spatiality suggests that colour images intensify how people inhabit place and understand social space.

• Philosophical Works on Colour Realism

Keith Allen (2016) A Naïve Realist Theory of Colour argues for colours as actual properties of objects (mind‑independent), which has import for how images in colour can convey objective truths or claims about the world, not merely subjective or relative ones. Through this theory, existential colour photography can ground its claims about social reality (ecological conditions, decay, presence) in a realism that resists accusations of mere illusion or sentimentality. (Allen, 2016)

Similarly, Joshua Gert’s Primitive Colors draws on neo‑pragmatist metaphysics and philosophy of perception to examine how colours as everyday properties inform how things appear to us, how experiences of colour are meaningful. (Gert, 2017)

• Colour Realism by Vernon Chalmers

Recent practice (Chalmers, 2025) offers examples: colour bird photography, use of local ecologies (Cape Town’s woodlands, wetlands), attention to light and colour not only as descriptive but as existential. His portfolio and writings emphasize slow‑looking, presence, the ethical dimension of seeing nonhuman beings, ecological fragility. These works show how existential colour photography is not marginal but socially rooted: people attend, respond, share, feel; the images become part of conversations about place, environment, and responsibility. (Vernon Chalmers Photography, 2025)

Challenges, Tensions, and Critiques

While existential colour photography has powerful potential, there are several significant challenges and tensions when viewed as social reality.

• Sentimentality vs. Authenticity

Colour can easily slide into sentimentality—overly saturated hues, romantic lighting, pleasing compositions that conceal difficulties. When existential themes are aestheticized, their critical or ethical force may weaken: images may comfort rather than confront. The risk is of “the spectacle of suffering” or “ecotourism photography” that shows decay or decline in ways that please or sell rather than disturb or demand change.

Authenticity demands care: choices of what to include/exclude, how to colour‑correct or stylize, how much manipulation is acceptable without masking reality.

• Representation, Gaze, Power

Who photographs, and who is photographed? Existential photography often includes nonhuman or marginalized subjects; there is a risk of appropriation or exoticism. Also, cultural colour connotations differ: a colour that signifies mourning in one culture might not in another; meanings are socially constructed. Photographers must attend to cultural contexts and power relations.

• The Compression, Reproduction and Loss of Colour

Digitization, image compression, display devices, social media platforms often distort or flatten colour. The way an image is seen on Instagram vs print vs exhibition will differ. These technical mediations affect how the existentially relevant colour qualities (subtle hues, low saturation, shadow) are preserved (or lost). In social reproduction, aspects of colour that evoke existential mood may get sacrificed for visibility or engagement.

• Commodification and Visual Culture

The visual marketplace (stock images, photo books, social media) tends to valorize certain kinds of images: bright, saturated, easily read, spectacular. Existential work that is subtle or ambiguous may struggle for exposure; it may be forced to adapt or present in more conventional forms. There is also risk that existential themes become trendy aesthetic genres, co‑opted into decorative or commercial use which undercuts their depth.

• The Tension of Locality vs Universality

Existential themes often aim for universality (mortality, freedom, finitude), but colour photography anchors in particular locality (light quality, flora, climate, culture). There is risk of universalizing specific ecological or cultural particularities, or conversely, that local specificity limits broader resonance or mis‐interpretation by audiences outside that context.

Implications and Future Directions

Given the foregoing, what are practical and theoretical implications for photographers, critics, scholars, communities, and for what might constitute a richer social reality in the age of images?

• Practice: Slow Seeing, Ethical Attention

Photographers working in existential colour modes might adopt practices that emphasise slow seeing: waiting for light, attending to small shifts, choosing subtle palettes, resisting fast editing or filter‑driven aesthetics. Training and pedagogy can help: teaching not only technical colour theory but ethics of seeing; of relation to nonhuman, of context, of cultural meaning.

• Critical Scholarship and Theory

Scholars need to further elaborate how colour intersects with existential themes: more empirical research on how viewers respond to colour in photographs in terms of affect, memory, ethical engagement. Comparative cultural studies: how different cultures perceive colour, finitude, place; how colour photography functions in postcolonial and Indigenous visualities. Also more engagement with philosophy of colour realism and perception, to support the claims of existential photography as grounded in perceptible reality, not mere subjectivity.

• Technology and Dissemination

Exhibitions, print, digital: each mode of dissemination has strengths and weaknesses. Print or physical exhibition conserves texture, colour fidelity, material presence. Digital allows wide reach but risk of distortion. There is space for hybrid work: augmented reality, immersive exhibitions, limited‑edition prints. Also, advocacy for better display standards, careful colour calibration when printing or publishing.

• Engaging Social Issues: Ecology, Memory, Justice

Existential colour photography is especially relevant now given climate crisis, species loss, environmental degradation. Images that make visible fragile ecologies, the beauty and decay of nonhuman life, human impact, can contribute to public awareness, policy pressure, cultural shift. Similarly, memory and justice: sites of historical trauma, displacement, migration; colour photography can help recover memory, assert presence of marginalized histories.

• Cultural Diversity and Context

Practitioners should attend to cultural colour meaning and particular visualities: how light, colour, architecture, environment differ in different places; how viewers in different cultures read colours differently. Collaboration across regions; including voices from Global South, Indigenous photographers; resisting visual homogenization.

Conclusion

“Existential colour photography” considered as social reality is not merely a poetic or aesthetic phenomenon. It is deeply implicated in how societies perceive themselves, remember, respond, suffer, hope, act. Colour infuses photographs with sensory, temporal, material presence; makes visible what is transient; grounds abstract existential themes in embodied, ecological, place‑based reality. Through its affect, memory, representation, ethics, colour photography becomes part of the social fabric—not just what is shown, but what is lived.

Nevertheless, the path is not without tension: between authenticity and sentimentality; locality and universality; representation and power; commodification and critique. The responsibility of photographers, curators, scholars, and publics is to recognize these tensions and to cultivate practices, institutions, and viewing cultures that preserve depth, nuance, integrity.

In an age saturated by images, the existential colour photograph can offer a counterweight: slowing perception, hearing what images whisper rather than shout; reminding us of the beauty of being, but also of its fragility; prompting reflection, ethical engagement, connection with place. As such, existential colour photography is not merely an art form but a vital component of social reality—one capable of shaping how individuals and collectives understand their being‑in‑the‑world." (Source: ChatGTP 2025)

References

Allen, K. (2016). A Naïve Realist Theory of Colour. Oxford University Press.

Barthes, R. (1981). Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (R. Howard, Trans.). Hill & Wang.

Benjamin, W. (1936/2008). The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. In H. Arendt (Ed.), Illuminations (H. Zohn, Trans.). Schocken.

Fisher, A. T. (2007). Existential Spatiality and Photography as Social Form (Doctoral thesis, University College London).

Gert, J. (2017). Primitive Colors: A Case Study in Neo‑pragmatist Metaphysics and Philosophy of Perception. Oxford University Press.

Hilbert, D. R. (1987). Colour and Color Perception: A Study in Anthropocentric Realism. CSLI Publications.

Oliveira, J., (2024). The Psychology of Colour in Photography: How to Craft Emotionally Engaging Images. ResearchGate / Zenodo.

Ray, L. J. (2020). Social theory, photography and the visual aesthetic of cultural modernity. Cultural Sociology, DOI:10.1177/1749975520910589

Sontag, S. (1977). On Photography. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Vernon Chalmers Photography. (2025). Vernon Chalmers as Colour Existential Photographer. Retrieved from Vernon Chalmers website.

Image: As presented from the Vernon Chalmers Existential Photography Galleries.