The Color of Silence

Round 2
Image 1 — "The Last Note" : 3.45
Handsome and heavily travelled — the abandoned grand piano in a misty field is one of the most photographed imaginary objects there is, and this version adds little the genre hasn't already done beyond the blue smoke standing in for the note still leaving. The tonal control deserves real credit, that faint glow along the keys against a bruised sunset, but the smoke is drawn rather than felt, and answering silence with a musical instrument keeps the picture one step away from the question the theme actually asks, which is about colour.

Image 3 — "Purple silence" : 3.60
The one entry that took the brief at face value: silence has a colour, and it is this lavender-grey, held in a narrow band edge to edge with the willow and the pagoda barely surfacing through it. The commitment to a single soft medium is admirable, but the two forms chosen are the stock furniture of serenity, so once the mood has landed — about two seconds — there is nothing further in the frame to find.

Image 4 — "Silence of memory" : 3.80
The most sophisticated surface of the round by some distance: a picture that is itself going quiet, plaster-pale, with a shoji grid and one economical pine branch as the last legible marks before everything below the horizon dissolves. That is a real idea — not a depiction of silence but an image falling silent — and leaving two-thirds of a canvas nearly empty is nerve, not timidity. What costs it the win is a hair too little to hold onto: the lower half slides from faded into muddy, and the horizon reads as a hard seam rather than a distance.

Image 2 — "A room after goodbye" : 3.90
The only picture here with a person-shaped hole in it. A shawl still over the chair back, the curtain still lifting in the draught, dust turning in the last of the sun — every object mid-use and nobody using it, which is a more exact account of silence than any empty landscape manages. The warm room set against the cold blue one through the doorway does the emotional work without a word of explanation: light on this side, whatever comes next on the other. It is the most conventional surface of the four, and golden hour is arguably the colour of memory rather than of silence, but this is the image I would want to sit in. My winner.