In this case, primaried has nothing to do with politics.
It’s a nod to red, yellow, and blue—the primary colors, originally defined by Isaac Newton. These hues can’t be mixed from anything else, yet with them you can blend your way to nearly every color imaginable.
What surprised me was how often they appear together in my own work, and in such different forms. I found them translucently in nature and plastic, and reflectively in heavy metal.
You may have noticed that these images aren’t purely red, yellow, and blue. Some areas fall into deep shadows, nearly black, while the hydrants show definite whites. I could go on at length about how color works, but the short version is that paint and light don’t play by the same rules. Mixed as paint, these colors absorb light and move toward darkness. Mixed as light, they combine to produce white. In other words, context changes everything, even with something as basic as color.
It’s that same idea of context that draws me to seeing these three together. The most basic elements can still shape everything we perceive. Red, yellow, and blue may be the oldest story in color theory, but they still have an infinite number of ways to present themselves. Sometimes photography isn’t about seeking patterns, but noticing the ones that reveal themselves. Maybe that’s a life lesson as well, making the most of what’s in front of us.