The Reinvention of Black (2015)
Saying black is the &quot;absence of color&quot; only makes sense when we talk about additive color.  For subtractive color, black is a color like any other, just like white is.<p>The entire area of dyes and pigments is intensely fascinating.  I went down this rabbit hole while trying to get a set of paints for a toddler that mimicked process color primaries rather than the traditional but inaccurate red&#x2F;yellow&#x2F;blue primaries.<p>Additive color is in a sense a solved problem -- we can create monochromatic light (or at least very narrowly band-limited light) in all possible wavelengths, and all human perception of color is based on a fixed set of wavelengths.  It is possible to produce lights that will mimic any color that humans can perceive.<p>Subtractive colors, on the other hand, are dependent on finding physical substances with emission spectra that roughly map to the gamut of human perception.  There are no magic substances that produce a monochromatic reflective baseline, instead, we are dependent on finding substances that have emission spectra that are simply close enough to the complements of the human visual primaries.<p>That&#x27;s a hard enough problem, much less dealing with the fact that actually applying dye or pigment to another physical substance involves chemical reactions that may affect the color of the pigment, as may exposure to ultraviolet or visible light, or changes in temperature.  At one point I had a Canon inkjet printer and I switched to using off-brand ink, because it was so much cheaper, and looking at the photos now (~5 years later) the difference is stark -- the cyans of the knockoff ink have almost completely vanished, even from photos that were not exposed to sunlight or significant direct light, while the original Canon ink is still true to the original photos.