Follow-up on Color and Presentation

A Follow-up on Color:

On February 17th, I posted a Question of Color, in which I reflected upon some of the challenges to making decisions about whether or not to work in color or black and white, especially when the decision is left to be made after the shoot, as it is with digital photography.

This question arose again when I was post-processing my images from the Blue Devils in Paramin, Maraval on Carnival Monday. A big part of the Blue Devils character is, obviously, their blue color, so black and white images would leave out that element. On the other hand, some of the same problems with color came up with these images, in particular the question of whether or not the blue paint was visually distracting from other content within the images, like the facial expressions of the devils or the on-lookers. Another factor for consideration was the night's poor lighting, the Devil's rapid movements, and my lack of a quality external flash. As a result, some of the images, which I find to be of a nice moment, look really crappy, but a black and white conversion diminishes the visual impact of the technical deficiencies. An example of such is the image below, of a Devil attempting to scare a nonchalant onlooker, and failing. I find her body language, the way she cooly drags from her cigarette and cocks her head to the side while maintaining eye contact with the masked devil to very sexy, an unexpected feeling given context of the Devil's activities. It's a nice moment, but it was dark, there were no street lights, and the only flash I have is my camera's built-in flash. The result is lighting that is too harsh and lacks atmosphere (see below).


When I was working on these images, I was trying to decide whether to publish them in color or in black and white, but instead, I chose to do both. My final image set consists of 6 color images and 5 black and white images. Although photographers usually stick to either all color or exclusively black and white in a single presentation, I've seen a few photographers successfully employ a mixture of color and black and white in their work. One of my favorite examples is Matt and Melissa Eich's multimedia presentation, Love in the First Person, published by MediaStorm.


Although the story is told predominately in color, there are two black and white images within the first 60 seconds. The piece also incorporates black and white video. Overall, it's a practically flawless piece of multimedia storytelling and I think part of its strength is its selective use of black and white images to evoke a different feel.

I suppose the real question is why you chose to present an image in color or black and white. With most artistic decisions, there should be some thought involved in it, and technical deficits probably don't constitute a good enough reason. Regardless, click here to see my image set from the Paramin Blue Devils and to decide for yourself if I made the right decision or if the color/black and white combination is just awkward.

A Follow-up on Presentation:

On February 26th, I wrote about how I was struggling with photography and I wrote a fairly convoluted brain purge exploring why I felt I was struggling, and some ways that I planned on going about getting myself un-stuck in my photography. One thing that I noted to be important was how a photographer chooses to present his or her images, and how the ordering of the images can be important. I used an expression borrowed from biology textbooks about how form mirrors function, and I'd like to present a perfect example, also from MediaStorm, Common Ground by Scott Strazzante.


For fourteen years, Scott Strazzante followed, and photographed, two families, the Cagwins and the Grabenhofers, as the Cagwin's farm home is demolished and the Grabenhofers move into the housing development that takes its place. The seven and a half minute long piece compares life for the two families, but its the presentation of the ideas that tells the story so convincingly. The piece is filled with carefully selected images presented side by side, a shot of the Cagwins next to one of the Grabenhofers, and although throughout the piece, the moments depicted of the Cagwins all take place years before the Grabenhofers' home was even built, the side by side image presentation conveys Strazzante's idea of Common Ground so perfectly, and so beautifully. Strazzante's conscious decisions about what form to use to most effectively tell the story is not only limited to his selection and pairing of images. There is a very compelling sequence at 1:43 in which the Grabenhofer father is teaching his son how to ride a bike, and part of what makes the sequence so compelling is Strazzante's use of stop motion animation instead of video. The still images, presented rapidly in sequence to give a jagged, uneven, video-like effect is so much more effective than the same moments would have been with video. In this case, the stop motion animation mirrors the son's unsteadiness on his bike, and emphasizes that all of life is just made up of individual moments, like individual still photographs. In the words of the famous Henri Cartier-Bresson, "Life is once, forever".

Struggling

The image above is from a set of images that I'm not very proud of, from the 3canal Jam-It! rehearsal (February 2nd) and Show (February 8th) at Queen's Hall.

I have been struggling with my photography for the last couple of weeks and I'm not entirely sure why that is, or how to get out of this photographic funk. Each time I go shooting, I come back and review my images with much disappointment. I keep finding the images technically weak and thematically understimulating. I don't think all of my recent images are terrible, but they are nothing that I can feel proud of... nothing that I want to send home to my parents or print for a portfolio.

I think part of what's going on is that thus far, I've only been photographing whatever events and places I happen to be around so I'm inherently lacking the conscious engagement that comes with deliberately choosing your subjects. I think it's time that I start thinking more about what space I want to occupy while I'm here and what role I want my photography to play in helping to form my own space in Trinidad. While I wrote a few weeks ago about the documentary value of photography, "documenting" is far too wide of a task for me to actually tackle.

One of the things that I want to do while in Trinidad, which applies not only to my photography, but also to my studies at UWI and my general social and life goals, is to live, study, and experience life here in a way that can only be experienced here. I want to study topics that I can only study here, I want to make friends from here who can show me a side of life that only someone my age from here can show me, and I want to take full photographic advantage of this unique set of experiences I have here, that I can't get elsewhere in the world. Somehow (although I haven't figured it out yet) I want to leave here in May with a collection of images that I can carry with me throughout life to remind me of the particular chance circumstances that resulted in whatever particular experience I had here.

On that note, sometimes when I feel lost with photography, I find it helpful to look at other photographers work in order to consider styles I would like to emulate and incorporate into my own work and also to consider how different people approach photographing various subjects. One photographer that I've recently come across on Lightstalkers is a New Orleans based photographer named Andy Levin. The first of Mr. Levin's images that I noticed were his photographs of Haiti which are, obviously, very relevant right now, and particularly given the consciousness of the destruction in Haiti throughout the Caribbean. His images obviously tackle serious themes of devastation, poverty, and death, but his images are also very human, and in my opinion, very hopeful. Mr. Levin also has a superb photoessay entitled Remembering Katrina: A Carnival of Suffering which is also filled with deeply powerful, and sometimes deeply difficult images of the 2005 Hurricane Katrina which hit New Orleans, Louisiano hard and killed over 1,800 Americans. One of the elements of Mr. Levin's photographs that I admire is that they are not always pretty. Sometimes, if the theme of an image is something dark, it does not make sense for the depiction to be contrary to that. Form should mirror function, but that's not always easy. As a photographer, I always want my images to be pretty. This consciousness of form mirroring function is something that I want to keep trying to incorporate into my own work. This first time I've ever felt like I did that was with my images of the Kalinda Stickfighting Finals.

Another photographer that I've recently come across, whose work will hopefully inspire me, perhaps in a less morbid way than Mr. Levins work on Haiti and Katrina is a Russian photographer named Mikhail Galustov. Mr. Galustov, who I also found on Lighstalkers, is currently based in Afghanistan. While Mr. Galustov has photographed some politically and socially difficult places including Afghanistan and Caucasus, I am really intrigued by his portrait work. Mr. Galustov has potraits of military people, families, women, men, children, and each one is visually different yet somehow consistent. He also does interesting pairings of some portraits, which leads me to another thought about how images are presented. I think it's important to consider how your images fit in the context of other images around them. In the context of a set of images, which image you chose to place before or after an image will affect how your viewer perceives that particular image. That's one of the reasons why I prefer organized photo essays that present images in a calculated sequential order over images haphazardly presented in chronological order of uploads, like on a Flickr photostream, which to me feels like you've just vomited up an incoherent mess of images.

I don't know how much logical sense this post makes but I guess to sum up:

1. I feel lost and confused with my photography right now.
2. I think I need to decide WHAT I want to photograph in order to get out of this funk.
3. I'd like to keep working on mirroring form and function.
4. I want to give the presentation of my images as much thought as I give the individual images themselves.

Ready... Set... Go!

Carnival 2K10

This is my flickr set of images from Carnival 2K10 in Trinidad. Images are from Canboulay Reenactments in Port of Spain, Kid's Carnival, J'ouvert, and of Blue Devils.