THE ISLAND OF THE COLORBLIND (2017)
Pingelap is an atoll in the Pacific Ocean where an unusually large part of the population is completely colour blind. It is a popular destination for researchers. Neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks wrote a book with the same title as Sanne De Wilde’s series. On the island, De Wilde took black and white photographs as well as digital infrared photographs, which she used to challenge her own perception of colour. Back in Amsterdam, she asked people with colourblindness to colour in several of the black and white photographs. In other photographs, we see those portrayed with their eyes simultaneously open and shut, owing to slow shutter speeds, a reference to the quick blinking of their eyes under bright light. In this way, De Wilde transforms the medium of photography into a metaphor for the limits of our visual faculty.
