The Purple Stage

In the weeks following death, blood drains from flesh and the crimson tones of muscle tissue give way to a shade of purple that seems almost otherworldly.

This is, perhaps, the most interesting phase of the decomposition process.

The purple of rotting flesh is such a remarkable colour. Like the yellow of a ripe lemon, it is a hue so impossibly saturated and rich that it seems almost cartoonish and hyperreal. If I hadn’t seen this colour with my own eyes so many times, I’d have imagined that images like these had the “saturation” slider set to 100 in Lightroom. In fact, these images have actually been desaturated quite a bit in post-production. If anything, the purple on display here has been toned down as compared to nature’s garish display of death.

Images like this serve as an interesting reminder of just how ambiguous the photographic process really is. Barring explicit manipulation in Photoshop, we often like to imagine that a photograph captures the scene precisely as it was. But there’s so much room to change the meaning and mood of an image with more subtle choices like focal length, exposure, white balance, etc. For this series of images I was faced with an interesting conundrum: should I present the purple tones of rotting flesh as they really are, knowing full well that they might come off as cartoonish and discordant with the mood of the project? Or should I tone the image down, desaturated those purple hues in an effort to make the scene match the viewer’s expectations? In the end I opted for a kind of middle ground. My images are all desaturated to some extent–this is a crucial part of having a unified and consistent aesthetic across my work. But, still, I wanted to preserve some sense of that alien shade of purple. I love muted colours. But, in the end, I couldn’t bear to rob death of its most ostentatious display.