If a black and white photograph is a 'departure from reality' (and surely it is), then why are so many photographers still drawn to taking them? And what is their appeal for the viewer? Is it merely nostalgia as some have claimed? After all, the oldest among us grew up I'm a world of black and white films, TV and family snapshots.
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‘That’s my village, Bangaan’, said Conchita, pointing to a cluster of houses among the rice terraces far below where we stood on the terrace of a simple roadside restaurant. Peering down through the drizzling rain I could make out a simple church and rooftops of corrugated metal and thatch.
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Neil Gaiman once said, 'Picking five favourite books is like picking the five body parts you'd most like not to lose.' If you replace the word ‘books’ in that quote with ‘photographs’ you will know exactly how I feel. I have a similar reaction when people ask me which are my top three / five / ten places I’ve visited.
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When we travel, we love to try the food of our destinations. Pasta in Italy (of course!), curry in India, kimchi in North Korea, even grasshoppers in Oaxaca. And on our latest trip to the Philippines we naturally enjoyed many local dishes, and like the Filipinos themselves ate rice with almost every meal.
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What we choose to leave out of a photograph matters as much as what we choose to include. And we are making such decisions every time we point our camera at a subject. But thanks to digital photography it is now very easy to make them retrospectively, when we come to edit our shots. Furthermore, we can take a single shot and test out a variety of options.
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A good portrait photograph is shaped by the connection between two people, photographer and subject. Without that connection the image is at best less interesting, at worst lifeless. When we look at an interesting portrait we discover something about the person portrayed: their life, their character. But we only do so if the photographer has discovered this and brought it out in their image.
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The smallest things can trigger a memory: a song, a scent, a throwaway remark. Yesterday, for me, it was a single word, a place name: Monneville. Very many moons ago, in my teens, I spent about ten days living in Monneville as a pupil on my school’s French Exchange programme.
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I have been taking photos since I was ten years old, so for almost sixty years. As a child I photographed my family, mainly on family holidays. As I grew older I documented school trips abroad, my time at university, and of course holidays.
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The Ifugao are the indigenous people of the Banaue, the area of Luzon Island famed for its UNESCO listed rice terraces. The name means ‘people of the earth'.
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The locals in the Ifugao region of Luzon Island in the Philippines chew moma as protection against the cold. This is a mix of betel nut, betel leaf, tobacco and slaked lime powder (usually made from heating crushed sea or snail shells).
