For a few months now I’ve been keeping a feed of images at the website http://wwww.VisuallyIntelligent.com
‘Visually Intelligent’ has been a collective saying at my alma mater, St. Edward’s University, for years now. Bill Kennedy, the person who established the program, coined the phrase during lectures to explain that great art was technically, conceptually, and aesthetically beautiful.
VisuallyIntelligent.com is a way for me to transmit and reference the newly found visual art that I find fit aforementioned qualities.
A few years ago my friend Brandon Maxwell (www.brandonvmaxwell.com) took this image of me and our buddy PJ using my camera, and i’ve always loved it a lot, but the exposure is bad and mostly unusable, so i thought it’d be worth playing around with. I’ve been more inclined lately towards taking artistic liberty with the color balance. I’ve began a quest to come up with a few dozen color styles over the next few months.
I’ve seen this kind of color look a lot in W. Photographers Mert Alas & Marcus Piggott use something vaguely similar to this, very frequently.
It’s nice to have time to play around with stuff like this ahead of time, because the color shifts do have some bearing on the styling. It’s pretty easy to achieve with some masking and selective color. A major part of this color palette has to do with the fact that it was shot on medium format chrome film, and that it was briefly exposed to the light. Happy accidents are a good thing sometimes.