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.
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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”).
Leica’s monochrome cameras tend to have more dynamic range than their full color variants thanks to ditching their RBG filter, so if you’re a Leica fan their monochromes do actually have a performance edge if that’s your thing.
However, other brands can match their DR in full color. Compare say a Sony ILCE-7M3 vs a Leica M11 monochrome at photons to photos to see what I mean.
i like the monochrome locks, the way the subject is framed, and the resulting line directions, all on point
The kite is an excellent example of where black and white can actually make your image worse.
Black and white is really useful I find for when you’re just learning. It’s good at teaching you the importance of contrast and framing and gives you an easy limit to implement
These aren’t bad in black and white, just not taken with black and white in mind.
And for anyone new to it, if you’re always saving in RAW anyway, you can always get the color version back in post. Really makes it easy to do spot color this way as well.
Indeed, these are arranged roughly in ascending order of the importance of color. The locks picture works, and the one with the glass manages to still be an interesting shape although otherwise you’d never know it was green. The orange blinker and sign don’t tell you much about themselves at all without their color, and the bridge girder full of stickers is flat out boring. If it weren’t for the color standing out, you’d probably never even notice that kite was in the tree at all from the ground — I took that one at a 432mm focal length according to the image data, so it was quite far overhead.
As an aside, I wonder how many of those locks were shackled there in youthful exuberance now symbolize nothing, and are the only thing remaining of a parade of evaporated romances.
Probably most of them. The bridge was positively festooned with them.
