b&w — Blog — Chris-R-Photography

What if we tried to show the inner core of a person in a photograph? That was the question I was wondering about some time ago. You can read my first thoughts about this here in the article “Destiny (is a very big word)”. http://www.chris-r-photography.net/2019/11/29/s0tfzb1zssh7b7coavrfxtgdrmvv46

The starting point of my considerations was the assumption that we all have a deeper inner core of our person, of our personality. On top of that we develop over the years layers of behaviour that are determined by education, interaction with people, experience, traumata, neuroses and other influences. Our every day behaviour is a mixture of these layers interacting with the core personality deep within.

From there I was wondering if it might be possible to show the “inner core” of a person in a photograph. During my photographic development over the past few years I used long exposure photography, motion blur, intentional camera movements a lot. When watching these blurred pictures I noticed that it felt as if I could see deeper into a person’s characteristics in pictures that I had taken with this long exposure technique. The question is of course if a long exposure picture really represents a person’s characteristics on a deeper level or if a blurred picture gives the viewer more space to imagine certain characteristics because imagination can fill the gaps that the picture leaves. This question I have not answered to myself entirely, you might have your own very personal answer to it too.

In order to find out if my hypothesis works, I decided to start a photographic project around the core idea. The plan is, to shoot people with long exposure and ask them to do things where they feel that they are within themselves to the most. I would assume that every person has a different way of “feeling herself/himself”. So I am asking my “models” to do exactly what brings them “to themselves” in the most intense way.

I was lucky to meet Marine in Osnabrück during my current trip to Europe. Marine is a dancer with the Osnabrück Theater Dance Company. She agreed to participate in this project and we met for a shooting. The owner of YogaOmline in Osnabrück was so kind to allow us shooting in his rooms.

I asked Marine, not to “perform” for me but to find a way of getting deep into herself in her own personal way. She used moving her body for this. During the shooting we both remained completely silent. I did not ask her to strike any poses but only followed her movements with my camera.

I found this collaboration amazing. I was allowed to look into the personality of my “model” and to take pictures of what was a very intimate personal experience. Marine has allowed me to share the pictures. I am very grateful and thank her very very much.

What is your way of expressing the core of your personality? How can you reach deep within yourself? Is there a way of showing this outside? If any of you is interested in this project and wants to participate I would ask you to get in touch with me. Leave me a message on this website or write me a Flickr mail (https://www.flickr.com/photos/chrisrsouthland). I will continue this project over the coming months. Currently (September 2020) I am still in Osnabrück, Germany.

Yesterday I have been working on a street portrait picture of a beautiful woman. I processed this picture for hours in color, changed the skin color slightly, applied some frequency separation to clean and smoothen her skin (a technique I just had learned a few days ago), played with background luminosity and colors and created several versions of this one picture.

I was quite chuffed with myself because I had learned how to do these things in Photoshop (although I am certainly far away from mastery). And still, I had the feeling that something is missing. Maybe I over-processed my picture? Maybe I did not know exactly how to relate color and luminosity to each other? Maybe I am just not good enough? I couldn’t put my finger exactly on it but it felt as if something was wrong.

And then I just converted the picture into b&w. And I loved it. I loved the tones, the light fall-off between main subject and background, the skin texture (although there is clearly space for improvement). I loved the lines of her face and the blurred ones of the background. I loved the expression of the picture and her portrait. I really loved her in black and white.

So what? Do I need more proficiency at processing color pictures? More learning? More understanding of how to interpret a picture during post-processing? Yep, all of this, sure. I need to learn a lot. But maybe I just have to admit that I am a black and white photographer... :-)