"This essay explores the relationship between modern colour photography and existential being, situating colour as both an aesthetic and ontological phenomenon that mediates how humans experience the world. Through a phenomenological and existential lens, it examines how colour operates not only as visual information but as an emotional and philosophical language through which being discloses itself. Drawing on thinkers such as Sartre, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Barthes, the discussion extends to the photographic practices of Vernon Chalmers, Wolfgang Tillmans, Rinko Kawauchi, and Nan Goldin, whose works articulate different modes of colour’s existential significance. The essay further integrates the post-2020 context - marked by pandemic isolation, environmental precarity, and digital mediation - to trace how the meaning of colour and being in photography has evolved. The concluding reflection speculates on the future of colour perception and existential authenticity in the age of artificial intelligence and image automation.
Keywords: colour photography, existentialism, phenomenology, digital being, post-2020, visual culture, Chalmers, Tillmans, Kawauchi, Goldin
Introduction: Colour, Consciousness, and the Modern ImageModern colour photography has become an arena in which being is revealed through light, hue, and atmosphere. In the twenty-first century, colour functions not merely as aesthetic pleasure but as an existential language - an interface between perception and meaning (Barthes, 1981). The post-2020 era has amplified this relationship. Isolation, digital saturation, and environmental anxiety have transformed how individuals perceive the world, with colour becoming an affective register of consciousness itself.
Existentialism situates the human being as a project of becoming - rooted in freedom, choice, and awareness of finitude (Sartre, 1943/1992). Within the photographic act, colour thus participates in the drama of existence: to photograph in colour is to assert presence, to recognise temporality, and to encounter the world as a field of possibilities. Photographers such as Vernon Chalmers, Wolfgang Tillmans, Rinko Kawauchi, and Nan Goldin work within this horizon, using colour to articulate states of awareness and authenticity. Their works are less about representation than revelation - about how colour discloses being.
Embodied Seeing: Phenomenology and Existential BeingPhenomenology, especially as developed by Merleau-Ponty (1945/2012), posits that perception is embodied; we see the world not as detached observers but as participants within it. The photographer’s eye is an extension of lived consciousness, and colour is the vibratory medium through which this participation becomes visible. Heidegger’s (1927/1962) notion of being-in-the-world similarly positions vision as a mode of dwelling, suggesting that photography, particularly in colour, enacts a dialogue between self and world.
Colour has historically been treated as secondary to form - an embellishment rather than an essence. Yet in existential terms, colour constitutes the mood of being. It modulates experience and carries ontological weight. The blues of twilight or the ochres of dusk are not merely wavelengths but existential tones that mirror human temporality. In photography, these tones can transform ordinary perception into disclosure: the world shows itself as lived and finite.
Sartre’s theory of consciousness as intentional - always directed toward something - finds visual resonance in photography’s framing act. The choice of a particular chromatic balance, saturation, or warmth expresses a mode of being-toward-the-world. In the works of Chalmers, Kawauchi, Tillmans, and Goldin, colour becomes the grammar through which intention, emotion, and temporality converge.
Chromatic Narratives: The Emotional and Ontological Weight of ColourColour photography, particularly since the late twentieth century, has evolved from technical novelty to existential practice. The shift from monochrome modernism to colour realism signalled not merely aesthetic liberation but an ontological one: a return of lived experience to representation (Shore, 2010). Colour’s immediacy invites empathy; it collapses the distance between subject and spectator.
In phenomenological terms, colour is affect made visible. The warmth of morning light conveys serenity; the cyan of an overexposed sea may suggest melancholy. These associations are culturally conditioned yet experientially grounded. Kawauchi’s tender pastel hues evoke the sacred within the mundane, while Goldin’s saturated reds and yellows immerse the viewer in emotional intensity. Tillmans employs colour’s ambiguity - its capacity to oscillate between abstraction and presence - to mirror the fragility of contemporary existence.
Chalmers, meanwhile, situates colour as a mode of being-with-nature. His contemplative photographs of birds and coastal light, often composed within the subtle palette of the Cape shoreline, articulate what Heidegger might call dwelling - an attunement to the world’s presencing. In each artist, colour becomes the existential bridge between perception and meaning.
Four Voices in Modern Colour Photography- Vernon Chalmers: Presence and the Lived Colour of the Moment
Chalmers’ photography, emerging from the landscapes and wildlife of South Africa’s Western Cape, embodies a meditative engagement with presence. His practice reflects an existential attentiveness to the immediate - the heron lifting through mist, the blue shimmer of early morning water. Chalmers’ colours are rarely exaggerated; they exist within the subtle register of natural light, situating being as continuity between observer and environment (Chalmers, 2025).
From a phenomenological view, Chalmers’ work enacts what Merleau-Ponty termed the flesh of the world - the intertwining of self and nature through perception. Each photograph becomes a testimony to what is fleeting yet infinite. In this way, Chalmers’ colour is not decorative but ontological: it affirms existence through attention. Vernon Chalmers Website
- Wolfgang Tillmans: Fragility, Light, and Modern Contingency
Wolfgang Tillmans operates at the intersection of abstraction and documentary, exploring how colour articulates the precarity of modern being. His abstract series - Freischwimmer (2003–2009) and Silver (2008) - transform chemical reactions and digital distortions into luminous meditations on impermanence. For Tillmans, light and colour are unstable yet revealing; they visualise the tension between order and entropy (Tillmans, 2017).
In existential terms, Tillmans’ work captures what Sartre (1943/1992) described as nausea - the confrontation with contingency. Yet his chromatic openness also evokes transcendence: light as the promise of renewal. His portraits and still-lifes, often infused with ambient hues, humanise the contemporary moment, showing that even within flux, being persists. Wolfgang Tillmans Website
- Rinko Kawauchi: Ephemeral Wonder and the Everyday Sublime
Rinko Kawauchi’s colour palette is one of translucence - soft blues, pale pinks, and milky whites. Her photographs invite contemplation of the everyday as a site of transcendence. In Illuminance (2011), moments such as sunlight filtering through curtains or a droplet catching light become epiphanies of being. Kawauchi’s use of colour expresses an existential tenderness, aligning with the Japanese aesthetic of mono no aware, the pathos of impermanence.
Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception illuminates Kawauchi’s vision: her camera perceives not objects but atmospheres. The colour field in her work dissolves subject-object duality; it is being-in-the-moment made visible. Through this, she renders the ordinary as sacre - an ethics of seeing grounded in wonder (Kawauchi, 2011). Rinko Kawauchi Website
- Nan Goldin: Memory, Intimacy, and the Colour of Survival
Post-2020 Visual Existentialism: Technology, Isolation, and the Digital SelfNan Goldin’s colour is visceral. In The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986), the deep reds, yellows, and shadows evoke the emotional intensity of intimacy, addiction, and loss. Goldin’s photographs confront being through vulnerability. Colour here operates as confession - embodied memory inscribed in light.
Barthes’ (1981) notion of the punctum - the detail that wounds - finds its chromatic expression in Goldin’s saturated tones. Each frame bleeds emotion; colour becomes the trace of survival. Her work also prefigures the post-2020 condition: the entanglement of identity, trauma, and visual documentation in a mediated world. Nan Golding Website
The post-2020 period introduced new dimensions of existential colour. Pandemic isolation, environmental anxiety, and technological immersion altered how individuals perceived reality. The screen became both mirror and membrane - an interface through which being encountered itself.
During global lockdowns, photography became an act of affirmation. Colour mediated the confinement of space: the glow of a laptop light, the artificial warmth of digital filters, or the deep saturation of virtual sunsets shared on social media. These images were not escapist but ontological; they testified to a collective attempt to sustain presence in absence (Sontag, 2020).
For photographers like Chalmers and Tillmans, the period deepened attention to fragility and presence. Chalmers’ localised practice - working within limited physical radii - re-anchored being in proximity and repetition. Tillmans’ COVID-era projects, exploring empty spaces and suspended light, expressed a shared vulnerability.
The digital turn also invited philosophical questioning. Heidegger warned that technology risks enframing the world as resource (Gestell), reducing being to function (Heidegger, 1954/1977). Yet post-2020 digital colour also enabled renewal: virtual exhibitions, smartphone photography, and online collectivity expanded the horizon of visibility. Kawauchi’s luminous minimalism found resonance in digital calmness, while Goldin’s activism against exploitation in the opioid and art industries (Memory Lost, 2019–2021) transformed colour into protest - existence as ethical presence.
Thus, post-2020 colour photography reveals a paradox: technology distances and discloses simultaneously. Within its glow, being seeks authenticity amid simulation.
Conclusion: The Future of Colour and Being in AI-Mediated Visual CultureAs artificial intelligence begins to generate and curate images autonomously, the relationship between colour and existential being enters a new epoch. AI models reproduce hue, contrast, and atmosphere with mathematical precision, yet they lack what Sartre called intentional consciousness - the directedness that gives meaning to perception. The human photographer’s act remains an existential declaration: I see, therefore I am engaged with being.
However, AI’s capacity to simulate perception challenges this authenticity. The question emerges: can colour still bear ontological truth when detached from embodied seeing? Perhaps the answer lies not in opposition but dialogue. AI-assisted creation may invite photographers to reconsider what authenticity means - to return to presence as affect, not algorithm.
Environmental awareness and post-human perspectives also redefine the chromatic field. As climate change alters light quality, atmosphere, and ecological tone, colour becomes an index of planetary being. Photographers increasingly respond to these transformations, using hue to express mourning and renewal. The future of colour photography may thus merge existential aesthetics with ecological consciousness - a new ethos of light that acknowledges both fragility and connection.
In this evolving landscape, Chalmers’ contemplative realism, Tillmans’ experimentalism, Kawauchi’s quiet transcendence, and Goldin’s emotional candour converge as four responses to the same question: how can colour still make us feel real? The answer, perhaps, is that colour endures as the last analogue of being - an embodied resonance in an increasingly artificial world." (Source: ChatGPT 2025)
References
Barthes, R. (1981). Camera lucida: Reflections on photography (R. Howard, Trans.). Hill and Wang.
Chalmers, V. (2025). Vernon Chalmers Existential Photographic Practice, accessed October 04, 2025, Vernon Chalmers Photography.
Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and time (J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson, Trans.). Harper & Row. (Original work published 1927)
Heidegger, M. (1977). The question concerning technology (W. Lovitt, Trans.). Harper & Row. (Original work published 1954)
Kawauchi, R. (2011). Illuminance. Aperture.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (2012). Phenomenology of perception (D. A. Landes, Trans.). Routledge. (Original work published 1945)
Sartre, J.-P. (1992). Being and nothingness (H. E. Barnes, Trans.). Washington Square Press. (Original work published 1943)
Shore, S. (2010). The nature of photographs: A primer. Phaidon.
Sontag, S. (2020). On photography. Penguin Modern Classics. (Original work published 1977)
Tillmans, W. (2017). What’s wrong with redistribution? David Zwirner Books.
Image: Created by ChatGPT