11th August 2016 Street Photography

Colour Photos

 

Street Photography. 30 Black and White and 30 Colour images.

I walked through Durham City, spending most of my time in the Market Place, taking photographs as I went. The exercise was to take 30 black and white and 30 colour images in a street photography style. I actually took quite a few more.

I took all the images in RAW format and converted them when I got home. My criteria for converting from colour to black and white were:-

• Convert if there is a distracting red in the image that pulls the eye away from the main point.
• Convert if there is distracting detail or if the image is too busy.
• Convert if there’s a perceived need to put some distance between the reality and the image.

If I had not had the camera with me I’m sure I would have remembered very few specifics about this short walk. The act of taking a photograph has fixed the memory. Things I saw between taking photographs are already forgotten. I’m reminded of a line in Alpha House, a satire on the American Republican Party, when a reporter asks, “Do you mind if I tape this (conversation), otherwise it didn’t happen”, echoing David Campany’s comments on the mnemonic superiority of photographs.(1) Calvino expressed the same idea more forcibly: “It is only when they (the photographers) have the photos before their eyes that they seem to take tangible possession of the day they spent, only then that the mountain stream, the movement of the child with its pail, the glint of the sun on the wife’s legs take on an irrevocability of what has been and can no longer be doubted.”(2)

Why colour?

Meyerowitz shares his reasons [for] shooing [sic] in color– one of the main reasons being the emotions and sensations he got from the description of color:
Interviewer: Why are you using color?
Meyerowitz: Because it describes more things.
Interviewer: What do you mean by description?
Meyerowitz: When I say description, I don’t only mean mere fact and the cold accounting of things in the frame. I really mean the sensation I get from things—their surface and color—my memory of them in other conditions as well as their connotative qualities. Color plays itself out along a richer band of feelings—more wavelengths, more radiance, more sensation. I wanted to see more and experience more feelings from a photograph, and I wanted bigger images that would describe things more fully, more cohesively. Slow-speed color film provided that. (3)

Both formats fix a sight that appeared in front of the camera but black and white selects form over content and by removing one element of nature, colour, and restricting “the sensation one can get from things”, separates the viewer further from the view. Red, for example, can jump out at the eye. Colours in details demand to be interpreted by the eye.

   

A closer crop can achieve a similar result but limits the context.

Sometimes colour is essential in making a point.

  

Sometimes a photograph being in colour or monochrome is more or less irrelevant to the point the picture makes. However, I prefer the black and white because it diminishes the distracting blue I could not avoid in the background.

  

(1) http://davidcampany/com/safety-in-numbness/
(2) Calvino,I. The Adventure of a Photographer. in Difficult Loves (1971)
(3) http://erickimphotography.com/blog/2014/01/22/12-lessons-joel-meyerowitz-has-taught-me-about-street-photography/

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