DORIS MITSCH

See the article: "Heartbeat: Doris Mitsch's Posies for Predators" on ecosalon, August 2011

Posies for Predators:
speculations on the visual experience of people (and carnivores) with Protanopia
and Deuteranopia-type (red-green) color blindness

Red-green color blindness affects about seven or eight percent of American men and most predatory animals.

For the carnivores, it seems to affect the effects of some kinds of camouflage. But what about the men? Do they have some advantage in seeing the world on a more level chromatic playing field, eliminating both the fiery end of the spectrum and the calming middle? Or are they just missing something the rest of us can't imagine doing without? (One man told me he had only a little trouble distinguishing between red and green, but it turned out that he thought they were pretty similar anyway -- as close as, say, beige and taupe.) Are aggressive men more likely to be colorblind? Are colorblind men more inclined to seek thrills in other ways? Is love still like a red, red rose when it appears in shades of drab from petal to stem? What about that lady in red?

These are part of a series, in progress, of photographs of flowers in conventionally feminine, sensual colors, mainly red and pink, with hues shifted to approximate, for the rest of us, the way they might appear to people with severe red-green colorblindness. At first I couldn't work on these for very long at one time, because it made me feel a little sick. Now I'm starting to get used to it.

Work in progress.

 

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Copyright 2011 Doris Mitsch