This photograph is the key image of the series,

The Island of the Colorblind.

A lot of my work on my personal projects

is centred around a certain genetic trail

that runs through people's lives

and that shapes and forms their community

or their personal life or their physical identity.

The Island of the Colorblind is a series about achromatopsia

or complete colour blindness.

There's an island in the Pacific in Micronesia

where there's an extremely high percentage

of this very extraordinary kind of colour blindness

that doesn't allow people to see colour.

I started photography developing in the dark room.

In black and white, on film and making my own prints.

Since then, I never touched black and white

until this project came up.

So after I returned from the island,

I invited achromatopic people from the Netherlands and Belgium

to bring colour back into my black and white images,

to literally paint onto the image.

People felt free and at the same time struggled

with not being able to have control over colour as well,

because I wouldn't tell them which colours they were using.

And it makes people feel unsecure and uncomfortable.

During the painting sessions I organised, I met Annefloor.

She's from the Netherlands

and she has achromatopic vision and she's super talented.

She made beautiful paintings

and really added on another layer to the work

by really allowing me to see through her eyes.

To Pingelap I brought my D700 that I had converted to infrared

and the D810 that I used as a normal camera.

I wanted to experiment with infrared

because I wanted to find a way for myself to redefine

and rediscover colour while shooting the project.

With this converted camera that reads light differently,

I was also triggered to rethink the colour perspective

and the result of that are images that are so surreal in their colours

that it makes people open up to this whole new reality

and this freedom of colour that you get

if you let go of the conventional way of looking at it.

The work The Island of the Colorblind is about trying to open people's eyes

to not seeing the absence of something

as something you lack or as a weakness,

but as strength, as something that is a richness,

as something that adds on to your own reality that you create

and that you have the power to create and that you create in your own way.

And it's about connecting vision at the same time acknowledging

that we all see the world differently.

THAT SHOT