A Contest Of Hues Incorporation

Rothkography

I'm no art historian, but as a designer, I've always been fascinated by how simple art can be. The color field paintings of Mark Rothko and Josef Albers, Damien Hirst's "Spot Paintings" and Gerhard Richter's "Colour Charts" always seemed about as "artistic" to me as a Pantone book, but on the other hand, I've spent a lot of time lovingly flipping through Pantone books.

The other day, I accidentally took a photo of a corner of a wall, and thanks to improperly-adjusted white balance, no attention to focus, and the contrast of the lighting of the two sections of wall, I ended up with a photographic-outsider-art Mark Rothko painting. I took a few more, probably sloppily approximating the work of countless photographers before me (I know even less about photography history than art history), and realized you could find some pretty interesting color variations by varying color balance, exposure, and focus.

This is the easiest-to-enter (and hardest to judge) photo contest we've ever posted. Just take a horizontal photo featuring two relatively texture-free color fields. Please send only one entry, crop/scaled to 1024x768 pixels, RGB. If you don't know what that means, send it anyway. Attach your file to an email or include a link to it, to bryan at coudal dot com with the word "color" (or "colour" if you must) in the subject line.

--Bryan Bedell

WINNERS

We don't know how we'll pick winners, but we will, (there's nothing weirder to us than the quantification of creative expression, especially abstract creative expression). Aside from that, we'll try to make something interesting with all the entries.

PRIZES

A couple winners will get a Jewelboxing 100pack, a CP Tee and our Field Tested Books Book. In addition, twelve people whose photo is included in our mysterious final product will get a 3pack of Field Notes Memo Books. The deadline for entry is Friday, October 10.