“Indeed, it often happens that the light is so absolute, quiet, deep, making the color of the sky a perfect blue, even if just a little veiled, clear, almost marine, as to give the impression of not belonging to the present but to a miraculously reappeared past. The light of the myth that returns and repeats itself, if I may put it this way, but in this case the myth remains indefinite, it does not belong to any concrete moment of the return of the seasons, binding itself to some divinity of any religion, no, we were in the midst of it was summer, and time seemed to have never begun, one was in the heart of something – precisely silence, blue, fullness – whose passing did not count but its fixity, which happens precisely for the days remembered. Just thinking of past summers, the light of any of their days is so "absolute, quiet, profound". And here it is, the reason why my description, albeit a summary of this light, is not valid in itself but in its function of my story."

Pier Paolo Pasolini

“155. When the darkness of infinite space is viewed through atmospheric vapors illuminated by daylight, the color blue appears.
On high mountains, one sees the sky as royal blue during the day, because only a few fine vapors hover between the observer and the infinite dark space.
As one descends into the valleys, the blue becomes lighter, until in certain regions and with increasing vapors it eventually shifts into a pale white-blue."  

Johann Wolfgang Goethe

Photodegradation is the chemical alteration of a substance caused by the absorption of photons, particularly from ultraviolet or visible light. Over time, exposure to light can break chemical bonds in materials such as dyes, pigments, plastics, and photographic emulsions, leading to their decomposition or transformation.

 In CMYK color printing, yellow and magenta pigments degrade faster because they have weaker chemical bonds and absorb higher-energy light,
making them more susceptible to photodegradation. In contrast,
cyan and blue pigments have stronger chemical bonds and higher lightfastness. This means that  when prints fade under sun exposure, the blue hue remains while other colors disappear.

When sunlight enters the Earth's atmosphere,
it interacts with gas molecules, such as oxygen and nitrogen.
These molecules scatter shorter wavelengths of light,
such as blue and violet, much more strongly than longer wavelengths, 
 such as red or orange. Although violet light is scattered more than blue light,
the human eye is less sensitive to violet light.
Much of it is also absorbed by the upper atmosphere,
which is why blue is the dominant color we perceive in the sky.

Also the underwater world shifts chromatically
 because of the differential attenuation of light:
Water molecules scatter and absorb light selectively,
and longer wavelengths—such as red, orange, and yellow—
are absorbed more quickly than shorter ones.
By around 5 meters, most reds are significantly diminished,
and by 10 meters, they have largely disappeared. The visible spectrum narrows,
leaving primarily blue and green light. 

“I have fallen a long way.
Clouds are flowering
Blue and mystical over the face of the stars.
Inside the church, the saints will all be blue,
Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews,
Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.”

Sylvia Plath, The Moon and The Yew Tree

The phenomena mentioned above show how light interacts with matter and distance, and how the color blue often remains as a visual trace when other wavelengths—or the pigments that reflect them—have already disappeared. But color cannot be fully understood through its physical properties alone. The fading of a material image, its instability and gradual disintegration, reflects a historical tension and struggle; one that, in our image-saturated 21st century, can be read as a quiet form of resistance. In my ongoing work and research, I explore photographic temporalities that emerge beyond representation or surface appearance. I am drawn to the material image as it withdraws, as it shifts from presence to disappearance. This interest also touches on a phenomenological dimension: the way certain images confront us not only visually but corporeally; as thresholds that bring us back to our own perceptual limits.