In this statement piece, the artist is exploring the significance of objects as they relate to everyday life in the bleak mundanity of current century.
Pffft. No I’m not. I just made that up.
Instead, I walked around and took a series of pictures of stereotypical street subjects favored by the types of pretentious people who go around spouting that only black and white images are inherently true art, and whose beanies are probably a bit too tight.
An incredible amount of information is lost if you shackle yourself to monochrome. If you insist on doing so for artsy-fartsy purposes, I advise you to think hard about why first rather than just because it’s the done thing to do, as if it automatically adds profundity to a fossilized slice of light.
Luckily I didn’t take these in black and white at all. I simply smashed them into greyscale using my editing software. The full color renditions are:
- Locks
- Glass (This may just at the outside be a piece of genuine 19th century glass, but then again it probably isn’t.)
- Type B Barricade Light (Now you know what those are actually called.)
- Stickers
- Detour
- Lost Kite
If zis were an American film I would have a gun, and perhaps do a little car chase. But it is French. Merde.
The graffiti in B&W is quite interesting, and perhaps is an example of a lesser benefit of B&W, which is reducing irrelevant confusion (the greater benefit being cases of “well this photo doesn’t have much colour in it anyway, let’s make that a positive”). Multiple layers of graffiti just feels messy, this in some sense flattens the layers.
As others have said, kite is bad in B&W, locks get a different look (and perhaps lose distracting colour if you are going for “alike but different”).