The previous blog was written as the basis of a classroom presentation to my fellow MA students at the University of Gloucestershire. In the discussion that followed, I was asked why had I chosen to present the images in black and white; more specifically, why had I chosen to present photographs of people in this way. Very interestingly, I was asked whether this risked the ‘danger of nostalgia’.
I had never thought of nostalgia as a danger before. The roots of the word are in the Greek for ‘homecoming’ and ‘pain’. In English, the term may now carry overtones of sentimentality but there is a Welsh word, hiraeth, that may be closer to the original sense. The word has no direct English translation but has a sense of a strong bond with home, Wales, a sense of the past, loss and absence. In that sense, I think the photographs do carry a sense of hiraeth, rather than nostalgia and that this may have influenced me to present them as I did.
I also thought that there were ‘technical/ aesthetic’ reasons for doing so. In most cases, I thought that the lack of colour helped focus attention on the subjects, pushing away background and foreground distractions and the distraction of ‘extraneous’ colour, such as the orange logo on the sweatshirt of the little girl standing next to the boy with his head in the bag of sweets or the brightly coloured backpack in the picture of the line of girls.
However, I wanted to see what I had missed in choosing to strip away the colour and so reproduced several of the images alongside their black and white counterparts:
In most cases, I am happy with my original choice. In the pictures of the young people playing ‘street games’ in the original post, I think the association with the past is particularly right but in the case of the woman in the deckchair and the little girl and her mother, there is more immediacy, more life and more of the ‘moment’ in the colour images.
I guess this demonstrates the risk of imposing a ‘style’ on an image, for the sake of uniformity of presentation or because of a particular mood of mine and should help me look more carefully at what represents the image best, in its own terms.
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I think the previous images worked really well in black and white as they fitted with the post industrial landscape in which they were taken. But I think the ‘six girls’ photo works really well as a freestanding image in colour: the yellow wellies, the pink jumper and the red top.