Color Key

So Many Colors is a portrait series exploring how emotion can shape perception. Using colored gels, I wanted to create a visual language where light becomes an outward expression of what someone may be feeling internally. Each color represents a different emotional state: red for anger, yellow for joy, green for envy, blue for sadness, and other colors for the emotions that are harder to name.

I became interested in how color could affect the mood of a portrait and how strongly emotion can influence the way a person carries themselves. In these images, the colored light does not simply decorate the subject; it surrounds them, covers them, and sometimes overwhelms them.

Some portraits use one dominant color to represent a clear emotional state. Others mix colors together to show how common it is to feel more than one thing at once. A person can be angry and hurt, joyful and anxious, calm and sad, confident and unsure. The mixed lighting reflects the complexity of emotions that cannot always be separated or explained clearly.

At its core, So Many Colors is about emotional awareness. It looks at how feelings can become so strong that they change our perception of ourselves, other people, and our circumstances. The series asks what happens when emotion takes over, and what it means to pause, recognize what we feel, and bring those emotions back into balance so we can experience life more fully.