Sunday 26 February 2017

Red, Yellow, Blue

For a long time I have been a fan of the French literary group "Oulipo", which roughly translated stands for "workshop of potential literature".   Italo Calvino, Raymond Queneau, and Georges Perec are its most well known members (all deceased).   Again roughly speaking, the goal of the group was to generate new ways of thinking about and creating writing, often involving sets of rules, restrictions, or procedures.   The most famous product of the workshop thinking is Georges Perec's novel "La Disparition", which was written with using the letter "e".  The point is that the restriction forces the writer to become more creative, though this is certainly an extreme case.   A more prosaic example would be Perec's attempts to plan a Paris metro journey where you could only go to stations in alphabetical order, thus starting at a station beginning with the letter "A", then on to "B", etc.

In my wanderings about New York with my camera, I decided to play a little game of trying to take photos that featured the primary colors red, yellow, and blue.   Subtle colorations in the background were OK, but there should be no strong greens, purples, etc.    (This is not really a rigorous procedure, since I was not forbidden to take any other pictures I wanted to.)  (And of course with Photoshop you can turn any color in to any color, but this was not allowed.)  This turned out to be fairly easy, in fact, especially given a lot of signs feature those colors.   In any case, here are a few results.

They should all look like this:

















































(The power tools are yellow)