BEYOND YELLOW EYES - A photographer’s questions about color vision after cataract surgery
BEYOND YELLOW EYES
A photographer’s questions about color vision after cataract surgery
In a state of ecstasy after my first cataract surgery, I marvel at the blues and violets I can now see with my operated left eye, especially that royal purple of the couch cover that looks radiant, almost psychedelic. Comparing my vision to that through my right eye that also needs surgery, I notice that those brilliant purples had been a muddy, nondescript color, and the white walls a dirty yellow, as if I had been seeing through a yellow filter without realizing it, like the proverbial frog in a slowly heating pan of water.
Next month, I will have cataract surgery on my second eye and wonder how I will be able to compare my new vision to the yellowed colors I was used to seeing. Can our brains remember exact colors? Are there experiments that can help me measure the difference? Perhaps one way is to look at artworks created in the different modes of vision as evidence of perception.
Claude Monet, who was increasingly seeing yellower and yellower with growing cataracts, as can be illustrated by his brownish paintings of that period, finally agreed to have cataract surgery at the age of 82. The medical technology at that time could not yet replace the clouded lens in his eye - that in all of us has natural UV protection - with an intraocular lens (IOL) implant, so that Monet was looking at the world without any lens in his eye - a condition called aphakia. Apparently, he was then able to see UV light, as revealed in his late paintings that show a bluish tint in his white waterlilies. (1)
How did I photograph, in the past few years through my cataracted eyes? And especially how, as a nature photographer, I had not noticed I was seeing through a dirty-yellow filter? Were my photos different from those that I took before the cataracts started? I love to photograph the desert on my many desert hikes, while I also create macro-images in my studio of organic materials, like kombucha mushrooms. Was my choice of warm earth colors determined by my not being able to see blues? But then, I always preferred the oranges and reds.
As an art photographer who is not at all concerned with “representing reality”’, if there is such a thing, I loved to complement my orange-reddish palette with a bluish glow in my photo-editing, as if two different sources, like the sun and incandescent bulbs, were simultaneously lighting the scene. Apparently, I was not satisfied with only the warmer ends of the spectrum. Something was missing. Was that more strongly so during my blue-blind years?
I wonder if the new IOL (intraocular lens) that was implanted in my left eye gives my vision a bluish tint, rather than how I imagine seeing through a clear lens – my brown sweater clearly has a purplish glow in sunlight, and when I look carefully, the white walls that are no longer yellow do have a bluish tinge.
So, am I, like Monet, seeing ultra-violet light? My eye surgeon says my IOL implant has UV protection - as the retina is overly sensitive without it – but perhaps it is only partial, and I can see some of the UV frequencies? I checked the specs, and apparently what I have is rated halfway between lenses that block the most and those that block the least UV light.
In my web searches on these questions, I came across an article with an image of a color spectrum. Its writer says he can see the violet stretching beyond what most people see as the end of the spectrum. (2) I too see beyond the end of the violet in the spectrum, but not as far back as the author says he does.
There is something exhilarating about seeing the world in ways that most people do not, to distinguish invisible colors, to perceive a different reality. As if I am privy to a secret knowledge, shared only with a chosen few.
But what if I am seeing a distortion? While my post-surgery blues are brighter, I notice that the greens have become a little duller, since they are now lacking some of the yellows that I see with my right eye – do I like that view with my “old” eye better, at least when it comes to the greens? Or is this the way greens are “really” like? Can we speak of a perfect pitch in color perception, or is it all subjective, and we can never know if the blue I perceive is the same shade of blue you see?
I am told that in time the novelty of my post-surgery view wears off, the way yellow sunglasses at first make the world yellow, but then gradually, our brain adjusts itself and we start to see the colors in the “normal” way. Does that mean then, that before my surgery, my brain had adjusted to my yellowed cataract filters and I did see the whites as white, and the blues as blue? That possibility soothes my broken pride as a photographer that I could have photographed all this time without realizing I was seeing through a dirty yellow filter.
And so, will I, in time, slowly, without realizing it, stop seeing those vivid blues and purples with my two post-surgery eyes? Then I will no longer marvel at all the colors I could not see before the surgery, relishing this moment in time.
I will then see the world just like everyone else.
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