An encounter with the colour red isn’t the same for a person who is angry as it is for one freshly in love, although it’s ostensibly the same red both people are seeing. To the jazz musician, blue could easily recall melancholy where someone less sentimental might see calm, or balance. All our characteristics — our cultures, our histories, our latent biases — converge on how we relate to colour, which can, in some circumstances, induce physiological reactions. With her series colour and feel (2020-), the photographer Isabel Okoro asks these questions of the viewer’s psyche: how, and to what extent, might colour affect the response to these monochromatic portraits, which capture quiet moments in the artist’s imagined black utopia?

These images, quoted from a larger diaristic project, take inspiration from Carrie Mae Weems’s Colored People (1989-90). This series of portraits of black children — captured at the age when race begins to disrupt innocence — referenced the multitudinous “shades of blackness” and reflected on those social hierarchies built solely on colour and its corresponding privileges. Where Weems asks what colour means, Okoro is interested in what colour does. The psychological question she poses is reciprocal: how might the viewer’s present mood determine how they match a colour with an emotion, and how might that colour then, in turn, modify the viewer’s mood?

Okoro’s subjects, caught in states of tenderness and introspection, are all young black people in late adolescence or early adulthood, around the photographer’s own age. If a sense of ease or innocence or possibility permeates them, it’s because they belong to a remote society of the artist’s making: Eternity, a black utopic space free of violence and oppression, populated by Okoro’s friends and family, each of whom she “immortalizes” by photographing them. The photograph becomes not an act of possession, but a gesture of love. The subject is not captured, but freed.

* PHOTO OF ISABEL OKORO: Kemka Ajoku