An island of colorblind people: Around 1775, just 20 people survived a Pacific typhoon, and one rare mutation still affects the vision of many descendants today

Picture a tropical paradise: palm trees, turquoise water, a blazing sun. Now, imagine that same island, and every shade of blue, green, and red has been replaced by soft greys, blacks, and whites. For a remarkable number of the inhabitants of Pingelap, a small atoll in the Federated States of Micronesia, that is no imagination. It's everyday life.

Pingelap is sometimes called the “Island of the Colorblind,” a name coined by neurologist Oliver Sacks, who wrote about Pingelap in his 1996 book of the same name. According to the publisher's description of Sacks's book, Sacks traveled to Pingelap after learning of a community born almost entirely without color vision, and set up a makeshift clinic there to study the condition firsthand.

How one storm changed an island's genes forever
The story dates back nearly 250 years. Legend has it that in 1775, a catastrophic typhoon swept over Pingelap, killing most of the population and leaving only a small number of survivors, according to research titled ‘Homozygosity Mapping of the Achromatopsia Locus in the Pingelapese,’ published in the American Journal of Human Genetics. One of them is thought to have been the ruler of the island, who carried a rare recessive gene that caused total color blindness. As the island's small gene pool expanded, the gene spread more widely than it would have in a larger, more diverse population; geneticists call this a founder effect.


Today, 4 to 10 percent of people on Pingelap have complete achromatopsia, the formal name for this extreme form of color blindness, compared with fewer than 1 in 30,000 people worldwide, according to the NIH's GeneReviews entry on achromatopsia.

Scientists have also identified the biological basis for the condition. In a landmark study, ‘Genetic basis of total colorblindness among the Pingelapese islanders,’ published in Nature Genetics, scientists found that Pingelapese achromatopsia was caused by a mutation in a gene called CNGB3, which controls the response of the cone cells in the eye to light. When cones malfunction, people can experience complete color blindness, blurred vision, and extreme sensitivity to light, because cones are responsible for color vision and sharp daytime vision.

A photographer who tried to see through their eyes
In 2015, Belgian photographer Sanne De Wilde travelled to Pingelap to tell the story through art. She had heard about the island from a Belgian listener with achromatopsia after talking about an earlier project on albinism, and the link between genetics, geography, and isolated communities immediately pulled her in.

Once on the island, De Wilde explored various ways to represent what the world would look like without color. Some images she shot and converted to plain black and white. For some, she used a camera converted to infrared, which distorted natural tones into unfamiliar hues, turning green vegetation to shades of pink, according to her own project notes. She took up this technique in part because several islanders told her they could still sense faint variations in certain colors, especially red, without being fully able to name or perceive them.

Then the most striking thing happened. De Wilde asked islanders with achromatopsia to paint over her black-and-white photographs with watercolors, even though they could not see the colors they were applying. “Color is just a word to those who cannot see it,” De Wilde has said of the experience, a line that captures the gap between language and lived experience for people with the condition.

Back in Amsterdam, De Wilde expanded the project into an interactive installation. Visitors sat down, put on headphones, and painted along to an audio narration of the Pingelapese story with paints whose true colors they could not see as they worked. Only afterward were they shown the finished, colorful result of their “blind” painting, a small sample of the disconnect that people with achromatopsia live with every day.

What this island teaches the rest of us about perception
She has gone on to document other communities shaped by rare genetics, including people with albinism in Samoa and people with dwarfism in China, projects that sit at the same intersection of genetics, geography, and the social stigma that can come with looking or seeing the world differently.

To the millions of Americans who have never given a second thought to the colors they see every day, Pingelap offers a small but humbling lesson. The world might look different from where you stand, and sometimes that difference can also depend on the genes you carry. A project about color, in the end, becomes a project about perspective, and a reminder that no two people's view of the world is ever quite the same.