Black and White Photo

A Black and White Photograph

A photograph I saw on the internet copyright Arman Tezcan

            I have been taking a photography class for which I purchased a beginner’s model DSL camera. Photography allows us to do different things. Maybe we snap a photo to highlight to ourselves that something is important. It could be like writing notes while following a lecture. Even if we never look over the notes, we will remember things better when we do something to actively remember.

            Sometimes we take photographs to capture a thing and the background is merely incidental. A photographer might create a statement by composing a scene. He or she will plan every last detail captured in the photograph, so that everything means something. Or the photographer may plant something specific into a setting that is partially chosen for a detail but also contains an element of spontaneity within it. It is fun for me to look at a photograph done by a person I don’t know and try to guess what it means. This photograph taken by a photographer in Istanbul intrigued me. This blog is where I treat this photograph like a Rohrshach ink blot test and tell you what I see. Freud might praise my analysis or remind me “sometimes a photograph is just a photograph”.

            The first thing that captures my attention in this photograph is – well yeah, her. She captures your attention on a number of levels. The photographer focuses on her walking, in a few moments she would be out of the picture, but for now she is the focal point and everything else is background. Some of the background may be incidental and not essential to the photographer’s purposes. But the photograph is taken with the depth necessary to capture the background clearly. A photographer can just as easily set the focal stop so that beyond the area of focus the scenery fades into oblivion. Here the background is able to be seen clearly. The photograph is taken in black and white, and that too is a choice which might mean something.

            Why would we take a photograph in black and white? Black and white mutes color. It highlights polarity. In this photograph, the colors of buildings and people’s clothes are muted. The colors are not essential to what the photographer is presenting. Black and white heightens polarity. I realized this while sitting in a subway car in New York City. There was a diversity of people on the train this particular day. There were white, black, Asians from differing Asian backgrounds; Eastern Oriental, Indian sub-continent, Middle Eastern. Instead of seeing black and white in polarity I was seeing a spectrum of human color from the white to black colors of the human color spectrum. In that context I could see the vast similarity of a white person sitting next to a black person. If one wanted to heighten the distinction between white and black they would remove the spectrum of color in between. It is the same principle broadcast news uses by contrasting conservative and liberal perspectives while seemingly muting the spectrum of thought between opposing viewpoints in the spectrum of political or cultural thought. Is there some sort of contrast the photographer wants us to see by highlighting the contrast using the black-white polarity of color?

            In this photograph, it seems to be that the contrasting styles in the woman’s attire is highlighted by the photograph's contrast of light and shadow in the photograph's background. At the very back and top of this photograph is a place where the bright sunlight is reflecting off of the buildings. The remainder of the scene exists within shadows. If this photograph were in color, we would hardly notice this contrast because our eyes would be drawn to the varied colors. But by muting the colors the photographer helps us to see the contrast between light and dark that is part of the essence of this black and white photograph.

            This contrast between light and shadow reinforces the clashing styles of the woman's attire. She is wearing a fairly traditional Muslim head covering and her face is veiled. But then beneath the head covering is a modernistic cultural appearance including bared midriff and legs, lots of leg. Does this represent something perhaps being said in a photograph taken in its Istanbul Turkey setting?

            Does the woman represent the clash of possibilities in a modern Turkey that presently seems straddled between perspectives of light and darkness? I imagine Turkey to be a nation where many of its people imagine this to be the case. It is a Muslim nation, but with chosen connections to an economically prosperous modern secular Europe. Does this woman's attire highlight such a culture created at the intersection of Islam with modern secular Europe? Or is her Muslim headwear and her European skirt a possible veiled prediction of what will happen if the pro-Islamic agenda empowered under an Erdogan government seeks to impose cultural Islam from top to bottom on the heads of the Turkish people whose mix of Islam and secularism might not sit well with a large number of Turkish people.  Would an imposed Islam make the culture more Islamic? Or would it simply forge the sort of population where people wear Muslim head and face coverings while underneath it all, seek to discover ways to subversively resist the restrictions? What is that sticking up behind her back? Is that handle extending above her back and shoulder part of a sword carried on her back? Some viewers looking at the photograph thought it was. For me that was less than conclusive. But, what if it is?

            I think a case could be made that this photograph focuses on a woman dressed to highlight the contrasts of present day Turkey. The Erdogan era in Turkish politics seeks to encourage and highlight the Islamic nature of Turkey’s culture. But many resist, and are concerned that Islamists might suppress those who prefer the freedoms of a secular European way of life. But if Turkey's history in recent decades has been a kind of a dance between pro-Islamic and pro-secular democratic perceptions of culture, there is a growing reality that along its borders there is a growing trend toward violence and revolutions. Just as the sword possibly being carried by this seems uncertain, hidden, and surreal in this setting, so the violence on the fringes of Turkey seem. Yet there are growing worries that the violence on the fringes and just beyond the Turkish borders might make their way into Turkey.

            I could be wrong about the photograph. The photographer may have simply taken a fun photograph of a lovely looking woman dressed in her own unique style. Perhaps this last interpretation would more than any others interpretation be the most intriguing of all possibilities.