There is a fast way to make a colourful picture and a slow way. Adrien Broom chose the slow way, and built a rainbow one room at a time.
The Brooklyn-based fine-art photographer’s Color Project is a magical story about a young girl exploring the world of colour. As the story unfolds she travels from one colour-immersed room to the next, rediscovering the hues that make up the world, until she reaches the end of the rainbow where all the colours meet. What makes it remarkable is the method: in her studio Broom constructs eight distinct sets, each one wholly saturated in a single colour, each taking a month to build and shoot, with as many as ten people working to realise a single room.
Building the image, not faking it
By the time we first wrote about it, the project had carried the viewer through four worlds — white, red, yellow and blue — with behind-the-scenes films that were almost as compelling as the finished images. That “making of” is the whole point. In an era when any colour can be conjured with a slider, Broom does the opposite: she paints, dresses and floods a physical space until reality itself turns monochrome, then steps a child into it.
Why the slow way still wins
More than a decade later, with generated imagery able to produce a flawless colour-immersed room in seconds, the Color Project reads almost as a manifesto. The labour is not inefficiency; it is meaning. A room someone spent a month building has a weight a prompt cannot fake — the slight imperfections, the real light bouncing off real pigment, the knowledge that ten people believed in the image enough to construct it. Broom’s rainbow works because she earned every colour in it.
It is, in the end, a children’s story for adults: a reminder that the world is worth building by hand, one colour at a time.