On a day in 1961, about 3.30pm, at the University of Tasmania,
there was a Plant Anatomy practical class being conducted by a lady
with a Ph.D. from Cambridge UK. Very bright she was. All the
students - about 14 -were examining prepared slides of cross
sections of a plant stem with compound microscopes. When questions
arose from the students about where a particular cell type was to
be seen, this lady would move to the particular student's
microscope, insert a pointer eye-piece and point to the cells in
question. No problems - except one student (me) who stubbornly
challenged the teacher by stating: :"You cant see that!". She
puzzled for a while. Then she firmly declared: "Mr. Rhee - you are
colour blind. Go to the Zoological Dept. and be tested." (She
always referred to males as "Mr."). After a couple of days, I
presented myself to the Zoological Dept., to look at those cards
with coloured dots on them, used for testing colour vision. I went
through all the cards. You tell the examiner what number you see. A
clear verdict was quickly decided on. The teacher in my Botany
class was right. I WAS colour blind - the common red-green version.
I had no idea.I was 19 then. It's caused by a mutated gene on your
X chromosome - a sex chromosome I had inherited from my mother. All
those years had gone by, and I had no idea that most other people -
readily - and differently - saw the colours red and green. Whereas
for me, I almost needed to be touching a coloured native parrot in
a bush, before I could spot it. Of course that seemed normal to me
- that's how I was born. Thus, for colour photography - which I now
pursue as an artist - what I see in the red/green colour
department, regrettably is not what most others see. Decades later,
I was adjusting with Photoshop software, the colours on a computer
screen of a photo I had taken of a Tasmanian mountain vista. The
image had lots of white, pink and red flowers, which of course were
on green coloured bushes. My daughter was present at the time. She
exclaimed: "Dad - that's awfully green". I couldn't see the colour
problem at all. So, there is no question that - what I prepare for
a photo show like the one in this album - what I see versus what
most other people see is quite different in the green/red colours.
Hence, the title of this album: "Seeing is believing". I believe in
the colours I see. You believe the colours you see. Everyone is
right - for themselves of course.
