ELEMENTS

The book contains pictures taken by the author over the past three years, divided into five chapters, each dedicated to a different colour, its meaning and symbolic perception in different cultures. As Michel Pastoureau wrote in Blue: The History of a Colour: “... any history of colours must first of all be a social history. For the historian – as well as for the sociologist and the anthropologist – colour is defined first of all as a social phenomenon. It is the society that “makes” the colour, that gives it its definitions and meanings, that constructs its codes and values, that organises its customs and determines its stakes. It is not the artist or the scholar; neither is it biological apparatus or the spectacle of nature. The problems of colour are always social problems because humans do not live alone but in societies.”